Bug#831828: libgtk2.0-0: GTK+ 2 is not GNOME and should not depend on GNOME icons

[Laurent Bigonville]

Le 13/04/17 à 01:22, Pierre Ynard a écrit :
> Hello,

Hello,

> It's been many months. Any news, or beginning of an answer about this?
>
> Laurent, can you shed some light in this thread on why the hard
> dependency would be needed? Do you mind if we remove it?

I fail to see a problem here, libgtk+ 3.0 (even if it's built from gtk3 
source package) itself is not being pulled and gnome-icon-theme is the 
default icon theme for GTK2.0 for ages AFAIKT.

I moved the icon theme from a Recommends to a hard Depends because at 
the same time I started removing that dependency from individual 
packages. Adding the icon theme to the individual packages was 
conceptually wrong and error-prone as there is no way to detect if an 
application needs a XDG icon theme to be installed. Moving that 
dependency to a central place (libgtk is the library loading the 
image/icon in the end) looked like the thing to do. And in a lot of 
cases, not having these icons might IMVHO result in a degraded user 
experience.

One of the option would be to add a "Provides: xdg-icon-theme" (or 
something like that) virtual package to all XDG icon themes and then add 
an alternative dependency so the user could choose the icon them that it 
want to be installed. But this requires cooperation of all the 
maintainers of all the icon themes.

Regarding hicolor-icon-theme package, this is the fall back icon theme 
and it's only providing a directory structure and an index.theme file. 
The total size of the installed package is neglectable.

Even if we downgrade gnome-icon-theme (and the alternatives) back to a 
Recommends (I'm not a big fan of this but others might be convinced), 
hicolor-icon-theme must stay a hard dependency IMHO.

my 2¢

Laurent Bigonville

> Thanks,
>