Re: new: x11/xapp-symbolic-icons

Landry Breuil wrote:
> Le Thu, Aug 20, 2026 at 11:24:28AM +0800, Chris Billington a écrit :
>>
>> adwaita-xfce-icon-theme adds some xfce-specific icons and makes the Adwaita
>> icon theme selectable again in GUI apps of Xfce and other desktop
>> environments. It's a response to Gnome deprecating the use of Adwaita for
>> applications, while ignoring the existing usage. It could be included in
>> meta/xfce.
>>
>> xapp-symbolic-icons provides fallback symbolic icons (under hicolor) for
>> Gnome-ish apps that will appear if a user's selected icon theme does not
>> include them. Gnome seems to like scalable/action symbolic icons, and
>> coverage of these can be patchy in non-Adwaita icon themes. Though Breeze
>> and Breeze Dark are quite complete, they don't include all those that are in
>> Adwaita, for example. They are mostly absent in the 'Xfce default' icon
>> theme Rodent (based on Tango) which xfce4-icon-theme installs.
> 
> after discussing it off-list with ajacoutot@, can you remind/explain us
> why you remove the xsi-* prefix ? apparently arch, fedora & freebsd
> package xapp-symbolic-icons as-is, keeping the xsi prefix. my
> understanding is the python script creates symlinks in the user homedir
> or somewhere else ? meant to be run system-wide or per user ?
> 
> as it is with your port, there'd be a conflict with mail/geary on 3 icons:
> x11/xapp-symbolic-icons/ $cat pkg/PLIST | grep -v '@tag' | while read f; do pkg_locate $f ; done
> geary-46.0p2:mail/geary:/usr/local/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/actions/edit-symbolic.svg
> geary-46.0p2:mail/geary:/usr/local/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/actions/tag-symbolic.svg
> geary-46.0p2:mail/geary:/usr/local/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/actions/text-x-generic-symbolic.svg
> 
> i understand the idea is to propose a fallback for apps not shipping
> their own symbolic icons, but what should be done for apps that do ship
> some ? pkg_locate symbolic.svg |grep share/icons/hicolor/scalable | cut
> -d : -f 1 |sort -u lists 29 ports. luckily only one conflicts, for some
> of the ports they ship their icons prefixed with the pkg name, so what
> should be done for geary ? @comment the icons in geary and make it RDEP
> on xapp-symbolic-icons ? @comment them in xsi ? rename ?
> 
>> Both are minimal in size because the contents are all scalable .svg
>>
>> If you are OK to import them, it would help improve the default experience
>> for people who use the 'Gnome' applications outside Gnome. In any case, I
> 
> Like, which gnome apps render without icons/broken outside gnome ? (i have to
> admit i dont use any)
> 
> Landry
> 

The icon set comes from https://xapp-project.org/
OpenBSD doesn't have ports for any of their applications, which are more 
portable versions of the Gnome set, created as Gnome becomes more 
insular. Arch/Fedora/Freebsd have picked some up.

The bundled python script does a semi-interactive scan/replace on source 
code, it doesn't symlink, so is not suitable for use unmodified in the 
ports tree. Many ports would be affected.

Applications are supposed to prefix icon names or bundle them with 
gresources, so the idea was to just extend the hicolor icon set with 
default names, so that for users of icon themes that don't include those 
symbolic icons, the application would fall back to hicolor. Hence strip 
the xsi- prefix.

But as you point out there are applications like geary that install 
icons under hicolor/scalable without a prefix. If there's only one 
conflict (geary) it could potentially be patched to prefix the icon name.

I noticed missing icons when testing a port of Deltachat client 'parla' 
on a machine with a default xfce install and therefore non-Adwaita icon 
theme (because Adwaita* now has hidden=true). Parla has not been merged 
and might not be accepted. I queried with upstream and they switched to 
bundling icons as gresources instead, which solved the issue.

The diversity of GTK applications and the splitting of the Linux-centric 
desktop world into camps is making things more complicated. The last 
thing I want to do by proposing this fallback icons port is add to 
maintenance burden for you.

The adwaita-xfce-icon-theme port would improve matters but relies on the 
user selecting it as the active icon theme.

Chris