[ubuntu-art] Apport icons -- merely some ideas

[Donn]

> > Have you a link for me? I have found the artwork links on the wiki to be
> > pretty confusing. Then again, I've been distracted.
> Well there aren't any ;).  
Ah right, I walked into that one :)

> Currently, if you wish to develop in the "Human" style, you will need to
> use your package manager to leech the Human icon set and dowse into the
> 'scalable' variety.
I apt-cache searched around all I can find are icons for 'tangerine' 
and 'tango'. I'm sure I'm being thick.

> >> At the very least, we need to bind icons to locales and offer fallbacks
> >> as per the standard icon scheming in GNOME.
> I just had a rather long discussion with Matt Zimmerman on this
> (Canonical and Ubuntu's CTO for those that don't know who he is) and the
> net answer was "not in Ubuntu's scope".  In other words, this becomes an
> 'upstream' issue -- either GNOME or KDE.  In that, the issue is complex.
If there's one thing I have learned in Linuxland it's that things are always 
much more complex than I think they are. I will have to assume that when the 
horse's mouth speak it speak sooth.

You are waiting for the but ... I can tell :)

 But --
In my really stupid way, my inner conversation goes like this:
1. Any graphic we see on the screen comes from a file on the disk.
2. My experience has been of two kinds of files: resource files (indexed pics 
in them) and plain old image files.
3. Surely I could identify the list of path and filenames of each of those 
files.
4. If so, I could then substitute new files (of the same name and path) that 
contain different images?
5. Heck yeah, I say to me, why not make all of those files (or the directories 
containing them) soft links?
6. Now I'm cooking (virtually) and I see a python script starting-up before 
Xorg and it consults the locale and then lays down a bunch of soft-links to 
known locations where the locale-specific image files await.
7. X starts and Gnome/KDE/Xubuntu go about their time-honoured business of 
fetching images from files, exactly as planned.

Of course, if point 2 and 3 are not that simple then things go bad. If icons 
are stored *within* some apps (like they were in Windows apps, still 
are?) ... And if point 6 can't run as root... And there's security to worry 
about... etc ... then there is no simple solution.

>delines/index.html ), I don't know if voting would result in the optimal
> version of
> 'expressive and communicative' design.  It would very likely be a
> combination of preference with design vision.  It _would_ be democratic,
> but we can all imagine what a fully 'democratic' elephant might look
> like ;)
I bow to anyone displaying sense by experience. 

I would hope that such a voting system may *at least* float the most 
communicative icons/images to the surface, but I just don't know what will 
happen. Still, no-one but a local of the native language in their locale will 
know best what image represents "New File". 
Unless we ask them, we cannot know. I guess.

> The best course of action right now appears to be:
For private reasons I am not available for long enough to be credible here; 
right now all I can do is watch and contribute the odd thing here and there.

/d