Landry Breuil wrote:
Le Thu, Aug 20, 2026 at 11:24:28AM +0800, Chris Billington a écrit :

adwaita-xfce-icon-theme adds some xfce-specific icons and makes the Adwaita
icon theme selectable again in GUI apps of Xfce and other desktop
environments. It's a response to Gnome deprecating the use of Adwaita for
applications, while ignoring the existing usage. It could be included in
meta/xfce.

xapp-symbolic-icons provides fallback symbolic icons (under hicolor) for
Gnome-ish apps that will appear if a user's selected icon theme does not
include them. Gnome seems to like scalable/action symbolic icons, and
coverage of these can be patchy in non-Adwaita icon themes. Though Breeze
and Breeze Dark are quite complete, they don't include all those that are in
Adwaita, for example. They are mostly absent in the 'Xfce default' icon
theme Rodent (based on Tango) which xfce4-icon-theme installs.

after discussing it off-list with ajacoutot@, can you remind/explain us
why you remove the xsi-* prefix ? apparently arch, fedora & freebsd
package xapp-symbolic-icons as-is, keeping the xsi prefix. my
understanding is the python script creates symlinks in the user homedir
or somewhere else ? meant to be run system-wide or per user ?

as it is with your port, there'd be a conflict with mail/geary on 3 icons:
x11/xapp-symbolic-icons/ $cat pkg/PLIST | grep -v '@tag' | while read f; do 
pkg_locate $f ; done
geary-46.0p2:mail/geary:/usr/local/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/actions/edit-symbolic.svg
geary-46.0p2:mail/geary:/usr/local/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/actions/tag-symbolic.svg
geary-46.0p2:mail/geary:/usr/local/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/actions/text-x-generic-symbolic.svg

i understand the idea is to propose a fallback for apps not shipping
their own symbolic icons, but what should be done for apps that do ship
some ? pkg_locate symbolic.svg |grep share/icons/hicolor/scalable | cut
-d : -f 1 |sort -u lists 29 ports. luckily only one conflicts, for some
of the ports they ship their icons prefixed with the pkg name, so what
should be done for geary ? @comment the icons in geary and make it RDEP
on xapp-symbolic-icons ? @comment them in xsi ? rename ?

Both are minimal in size because the contents are all scalable .svg

If you are OK to import them, it would help improve the default experience
for people who use the 'Gnome' applications outside Gnome. In any case, I

Like, which gnome apps render without icons/broken outside gnome ? (i have to
admit i dont use any)

Landry


The icon set comes from https://xapp-project.org/
OpenBSD doesn't have ports for any of their applications, which are more portable versions of the Gnome set, created as Gnome becomes more insular. Arch/Fedora/Freebsd have picked some up.

The bundled python script does a semi-interactive scan/replace on source code, it doesn't symlink, so is not suitable for use unmodified in the ports tree. Many ports would be affected.

Applications are supposed to prefix icon names or bundle them with gresources, so the idea was to just extend the hicolor icon set with default names, so that for users of icon themes that don't include those symbolic icons, the application would fall back to hicolor. Hence strip the xsi- prefix.

But as you point out there are applications like geary that install icons under hicolor/scalable without a prefix. If there's only one conflict (geary) it could potentially be patched to prefix the icon name.

I noticed missing icons when testing a port of Deltachat client 'parla' on a machine with a default xfce install and therefore non-Adwaita icon theme (because Adwaita* now has hidden=true). Parla has not been merged and might not be accepted. I queried with upstream and they switched to bundling icons as gresources instead, which solved the issue.

The diversity of GTK applications and the splitting of the Linux-centric desktop world into camps is making things more complicated. The last thing I want to do by proposing this fallback icons port is add to maintenance burden for you.

The adwaita-xfce-icon-theme port would improve matters but relies on the user selecting it as the active icon theme.

Chris

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