xfce-base/xfce4 depends on x11-themes/xfce4-icon-theme even with USE minimal. x11-themes/xfce4-icon-theme is purely cosmetical and according to qsize -f occupies more than 10 MB, or 27% of the whole xfce4 desktop environment (with USE minimal). Besides that, a user may prefer e.g. gnome-icon-theme. I for example prefer gnome-icon-theme because it is more beautiful and (more importantly) because it is already on my system (as a dependency of both evince and libgnomeui). I suggest that xfce4 should not depend on xfce-icon-theme with USE minimal. Please consider. Reproducible: Always
You make an interesting point that the icons take up a significant percentage of the space for minimal configuration; let's see what xfce team thinks of this suggestion.
+ 01 Dec 2008; Christoph Mende <angelos@gentoo.org> xfce4-4.4.2.ebuild, + xfce4-4.4.3.ebuild: + Moved xfce4-icon-theme dependency to USE=-minimal and added + hicolor-icon-theme for USE=minimal The hicolor-icon-theme dependency is there because every icon theme I've checked already depends on hicolor-icon-theme and we need at least one icon theme
(In reply to comment #2) > + 01 Dec 2008; Christoph Mende <angelos@gentoo.org> xfce4-4.4.2.ebuild, > + xfce4-4.4.3.ebuild: > + Moved xfce4-icon-theme dependency to USE=-minimal and added > + hicolor-icon-theme for USE=minimal > > The hicolor-icon-theme dependency is there because every icon theme I've > checked already depends on hicolor-icon-theme and we need at least one icon > theme > Thank you very much. I will test when I get home. Quick developer responsiveness like this makes me feel that Gentoo is a high-quality and well maintained distribution. It also makes me feel part of it. Thank you for doing this for a community distribution.
> Thank you very much. I will test when I get home. > Quick developer responsiveness like this makes me feel > that Gentoo is a high-quality and well maintained distribution. > It also makes me feel part of it. > Thank you for doing this for a community distribution. I have emerged the new xfce-base/xfce4 and indeed it no longer depends on any icon theme that is not a dependency of something else. And of course, everything works as before. Thank you.
FYI: hicolor-icon-theme contains absolutely no icon images, it is just a base class that installs the hicolor index.theme file (/usr/share/icons/hicolor/index.theme) which is important for applications putting their own icons to actually work, as there'd be the standard index.theme file for gtk+ and the like to look at the right subdirs, etc. Hicolor icons are so called fallback icons, gnome-icon-theme or xfce4-icon-theme or something can override those, but the defaults as shipped by applications (their application icons, custom actions, etc) go there.
oh, well, guess I was already asleep when I checked "qsize hicolor-icon-theme" and read the 21.773 kB as 21,773 kB. leio, do you have any other suggestion here except for adding || ( *-icon-theme ) or moving it out of USE=minimal again?
Mostly icon themes themselves depend on it for some reason I think... technically probably everything installing stuff to /usr/share/icons/hicolor runtime depends on it, but that should be pulled in by something core to the desktop already mostly, so we don't really add that dep to most packages. For what purpose do you need this in the meta? I do suspect the desktop experience will be pretty dull if no icon theme is installed that implements the most popular icon theme names from the freedesktop standard, but other than that it's up to you on what to do, I think. Do you want USE=minimal to potentially give an environment with most icons (including images in the toolbars, etc) missing (or rendered as a missing image picture)? Or maybe we need a virtual/ package that gets satisfied by any of the in-tree icon themes that installs the most used freedesktop standard icons[1]? 1. http://standards.freedesktop.org/icon-naming-spec/latest/ar01s04.html
Anyway, I think we should either discuss this on a new bug where you can involve freedesktop-bugs@ or we reopen and retitle this one and do the reassigning (xfce herd is part of freedesktop herd).
