gnome-panel should not have hard dependency to gnome-icon-theme-symbolic

[Peter Hurley]

1. An icon theme file should not be a hard dependency. How would a different icon theme provide alternate icons?
2. The 4 symbolic icons referred to are part of the now-defunct User menu, which no longer draws the icons anyway:

static GtkWidget *
panel_menu_item_presence_new (......)
{
        ......
#if 0
 if (use_icon) {
  GtkWidget *image;
  image = gtk_image_new_from_icon_name (icon,
            panel_menu_icon_get_size ());
  gtk_container_add (GTK_CONTAINER (item), image);
 }
#endif

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[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

Sorry, gnome-panel does need gnome-icon-theme-symbolic for the upstream user menu. You are correct that gnome-panel in Ubuntu currently ships the "indicator" status menus like Unity instead of the user menu but it is still available for people to use.

A different theme can provide alternative icons by providing:
user-available-symbolic
user-busy-symbolic
user-idle-symbolic
user-invisible-symbolic

I'm closing this bug since I don't believe this breaks third-party themes and this dependency is necessary for some functionality.

[Peter Hurley (phurley)]

Hi Jeremy,

Firstly, I think you didn't look closely at the code snippet that I included. As packaged, gnome-panel does not render the icons for the user menu, so it doesn't really matter if the icons are found or not (that is, no functionality is broken by not having gnome-icon-theme-symbolic installed).

Secondly, I think the purpose of symbolic icons has wandered from its original mission. Excerpted from the README of gnome-icon-theme-symbolic:
"Icons follow the naming specification, but have a -symbolic suffix, so only
applications specifically looking up these symbolic icons will render them. If
a -symbolic icon is missing, the app will fall back to the regular name."

If you'd prefer, I could change this bug (and similarly for g-c-c and totem) to "<package> should use g_themed_icon_new_from_names() for symbolic icons".

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.