Bug#255591: possible fix found - must be patched into Debian's packages

[Martin-Éric Racine]

severity 255591 important
thanks

A friend pointed out that having the icon theme defined in .gtkrc or .gtkrc.mine
might solve the problem.  Looking at the content of my current .gtkrc I see:

# Autowritten by gnome-settings-daemon. Do not edit
include "/usr/share/themes/Nuvola/gtk/gtkrc"
include "/home/q-funk/.gtkrc.mine"

This indicates that the GTK theme configured by the theme selector in GNOME was
correctly saved, but info about which icon theme is related to the GNOME theme
is missing.  My friend uses the following stanza in .gtkrc.mine:

gtk-icon-theme-name = "Nuvola"

This suggests the following possible fixes:

1) GNOME's theme selector must be patched to save a string containing the name
of the icon theme into .gtkrc whenever someone selects a different theme.

2) the default .gtkrc copied into someone's $HOME whenever first running GNOME
should also include the name of the default icon theme.

*****

However... The application of these settings appears to be dependant upon
running gnome-settings-daemon, which non-GNOME session managers don't run.

Basically, GTK2.4's dependency upon gnome-settings-daemon for things like icon
theming in GTK applications (which affects file chooser usability - we are
unable to distinguish a file from a folder without the icons) is a serious
liability that must be fixed, hence the priority raise to "important" above.

Alternately, if there is any other way for a GTK2.4 application to load the icon
theme themsleves by parsing the .gtkrc file via libgtk2.0-0, then it should be
implemented ASAP.

Which one of the above solution do you think would fix it and, most of all, when
can you have it implemented? Thanks!

-- 
Martin-Éric Racine, ICT Consultant
http://www.iki.fi/q-funk/