I was looking at the naming of the symbolic icons in this theme. I noticed that the png icons end in -symbolic.symbolic.png. This seems quite excessive, since that’s two times symbolic in a row. The svg icons only have -symbolic.svg. Is there a good reason for naming them like this?
This naming has been introduced recently and it breaks my application (dunst, https://github.com/dunst-project/dunst). Users now have to specify for example “dialog-information-symbolic.symbolic” instead of “dialog-information”. I don’t think other icon themes name their icons like that. I could add -symbolic.symbolic.png and -symbolic.svg to the list of different file extensions, but it’s not defined in the standards. So this seems more like an adwaita bug.
The idea is that themes can ship these additional files, and GTK will load them without requiring the SVG loader.
This should not be necessary at all: the handling of symbolic.png is internal to GTK. Applications should use dialog-information-symbolic everywhere that matters.
The entire symbolic icon support is essentially unspecified because nobody has taken up the time to update the icon theme specification to include it, so it’s fundamentally a GTK extension.
Thank you for giving more insight into this. I understand the reason for this, but the issue I have is that it breaks software that doesn’t use GTK. You used to be able to search for icon-name.{svg,png} and find the icon, but now you have to search for icons ending in .symbolic.png and symbolic.svg.
I could add these file types to the search list, but I didn’t want to do that without knowing what the change was about. Your post gives me some insight in the change, but do know that the change could break other software that doesn’t use GTK (maybe QT applications?).
But .symbolic.svg ends in .svg too. Those are different icons, they are not same as full-color.
As for the symbolic PNG icons - unless you happen to be representing your icons internally exactly same as GTK does, these are of no use to you, they are more or less a cache.