Minimize Adwaita Icon Theme
TL;DR getting apps/components shipping more icons themselves and shrink the number that a-i-t actually provides and improve the devkit
Status Quo Problems
- gnome-stencils is bloated and keeps growing as icons are added arbitrarily for one thing or another
- applications use icons from the adwaita set outside of the context they were created for
- many icons in gnome-stencils are really just for specific cases, e.g. the Night Light status icons
- Magic png symbolics prevent a single SVG workflow for fullcolor. We have to continue to create 512x512 pngs even for new additions.
- things like Nautilus, the file chooser, Evolution, gnome-bluetooth, etc. still use and expose fullcolor icons
- this means all the icons need to be in GTK
The Future & Goals
- move as many icons as possible out of a-i-t and into:
- toolkits (GTK & libadwaita)
- the icon devkit, for application developers to pull icons from
- components the icons were made for, e.g. all icons used by the shell get bundled with the shell
- applications get app-specific icons instead of pulling from a-i-t or elsewhere, e.g. Builder
- one or a few master icon sheets are created that are more sane to maintain, e.g. the icon devkit sheet, a sheet for the core system icons (status, etc.) and a sheet for toolkits,
- Would be nice to have a simple build system without complex index.theme generation and symbolics and scalable separated. Rotting request.