[Development] Supporting freedesktop icon themes in Qt5

[Jerome Leclanche]

Morning

Qt currently does not properly support icon themes on Linux. This is a big
issue here for Razor [1] as we're a non-KDE-based DE trying to use pure
Qt. QIcon::fromTheme has some heuristics for KDE and Gnome, but other DEs
are not supported. [2]
We'd like to get this fixed for Qt5.0. My first attempt at getting it fixed
was through a proposal for icon theme configuration, which was (rightly)
rejected by the GTK team. After talking with them, they explained how they
use xsettings for it [3] -- kde has a kde-xsettings plugin which implements
xsettings on KDE too, so that could theoretically be used there too.
However it also means Qt is going to need an xsettings backend.

I linked a discussion post about it on #qt-labs yesterday, log below:
<girishr_> Adys: sounds acceptable to me. we only don't allow api changes
at this point
<girishr_> Adys: any fixes to make desktop integration better are welcome
<Adys> girishr_: it would be an internal change, but depending on how big
xsettings support would have to be, it'd be a large changeset
<girishr_> Adys: i don't think we had xsettings in qt, so i think the post
is correct that Qt needs to have an implementation of that first
<girishr_> Adys: it affects only xcb plugin, so shouldn't be a problem
<girishr_> Adys: sroedal is the xcb maintainer afaik

I'm not qualified to work on something like this, and the rest of the Razor
team isn't too available currently, so this is mostly a FYI post. I was
really hopeful to have this issue fixed for Qt 5.0, so if someone wants to
or is planning to work on it I'd love to know.

[1] http://razor-qt.org/
[2]
https://qt.gitorious.org/qt/qt/blobs/4.8/src/gui/kernel/qguiplatformplugin.cpp#line201
[3] http://git.gnome.org/browse/gtk+/tree/gdk/x11/gdksettings.c

J. Leclanche
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/development/attachments/20120510/06b0a46c/attachment.html>