Bug#649717: Strange wording in package description

[Justin B Rye]

Martin Eberhard Schauer wrote:
> Package: gnome-icon-theme-symbolic
[...]
> Description: GNOME Desktop icon theme (symbolic icons)
>  This package contains the default icon theme used by the GNOME desktop.
>  The icons are used in the panel menu, and in nautilus and other
>  applications, to represent the different applications, files,
>  directories, and devices.
>  .
>  This package contains symbolic icons for the default GNOME icon theme.
> 
> There are two sentences regarding the content and I don't see how they fit
> together. And I don't understand the difference between icons and symbolic
> icons. Icons are symbols and thus they are symbolic. Did I miss something?

Maybe it's talking about "symbolic icons" in this sense:

	http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/SymbolicIcons

...though reading that doesn't makes it much clearer to me what the
term is intended to convey.  *All* desktop icons are necessarily 100%
symbolic, in that they represent things, so what could it possibly
mean to single out a particular set of icons as the symbolic ones?
Maybe when this package description says "symbolic" it means
"graphically simple"?

I hope end users aren't going to be expected to learn this unfortunate
new piece of developerese.
-- 
JBR	with qualifications in linguistics, experience as a Debian
	sysadmin, and probably no clue about this particular package