Bug#764447: adwaita-icon-theme: should Provide and Replace gnome-icon-theme

[nandhp]

Andreas Henriksson wrote:
> Provides means something else is a drop-in replacement providing
> the same functionality. While adwaita-icon-theme is also an
> icon theme (forked from gnome-icon-theme) it is not a drop-in
> replacement for the old icon theme.

Although it's true that there have been significant changes (e.g. [1])
so it may not be suitable as a drop-in replacement; I'd like to point
out that adwaita-icon-theme is not a fork but a merger[2] of
gnome-icon-theme and gnome-icon-theme-symbolic. Those packages no longer
exist separately.

The reason why this is a problem is that both adwaita-icon-theme and
gnome-icon-theme have a large number of packages depending on them. 79
packages (including, network-manager-gnome) depend on gnome-icon-theme,
while libgtk-3-common (and by transitivity, all GTK 3 applications)
depends on adwaita-icon-theme. Several other packages, including Evince,
depend on gnome-icon-theme-symbolic. Having both versions of the icon
theme installed, as would be required by most GNOME installations,
wastes at least 10MB of disk space in duplicate files.

If it's not appropriate and/or feasible to resolve this within the
adwaita-icon-theme/gnome-icon-theme packages, should bugs should be
filed against the packages that depend on the legacy gnome-icon-theme,
so they can upgrade to adwaita-icon-theme?

Thanks.
-nandhp

[1]
https://git.gnome.org/browse/adwaita-icon-theme/commit/?id=52330b92bb069c073e4f31577499745480ee973f
[2]
https://mail.gnome.org/archives/distributor-list/2014-April/msg00000.html