Re: Silk icon set for Gnus and synchronizing it into Emacs

[Chong Yidong]

Ted Zlatanov <address@hidden> writes:

> There's two issues.  One, Gnome themes are meant for system
> appearance, NOT for applications...  Two, the standard Gnome icons are
> pretty comprehensive... but they require Gnome.  I think we can do
> better when Gnome is not installed or available.

We may have a slight difference of objectives here.

In the past, we added icons to etc/images as and when various parts of
Emacs require them.  These icons were taken, partly for convenience,
from Gnome.  Later, Jan added support for redirecting to the
system-installed Gnome theme icons, so that Emacs will look nicer on
systems where Gnome is present.

So, the images that we distribute with Emacs are "the images that Emacs
needs".  If Gnus or any other package in Emacs needs extra *specific*
icons, by the way, we should not hesitate to add them to etc/images.

If I understand you correctly, you want something different: for Emacs
to provide a complete set of images that arbitrary Emacs applications
might need.  While I agree that Emacs programmers might be happy with
the easy availability of such icons, adding hundreds of files to the
Emacs tarfile, not directly used by Emacs, strikes me as wasteful.

People make jokes about the Emacs operating system, but in truth we've
placed a lot of emphasis on using existing operating system resources.
Icon sets are an operating system resource.  That's why I was talking
about extending x-gtk-stock-map to other platforms---the idea is to
provide a cross-platform solution for Emacs applications to access the
operating system's icons.

Although adding Silk as an ELPA package is tempting, but I'm not
certain.  Suppose a package wants one single icon from Silk.  If it
depends on the Silk package, installing it means also downloading and
installing the hundreds of Silk icons, which is, again, wasteful.  Or is
the idea to make Silk an optional dependency, so that the package will
display icons only if Silk is installed?