XDG Specifications used in GTK+

This page is meant as a place to discuss the current implementations of XDG specs in the GTK+ stack, and as a place to collect suggested revisions for those specs.

Icon theme specification

Proposed revisions:

• Drop the .icon file stuff. It is really only there to support old nautilus features, and there are no .icon files in modern icon themes. The specification is odd (particularly for svg), and complicates our svg loading code. I've already dropped this in 3.13.3
• Drop excessive amounts of subdirectories in hicolor. The index.theme file defines 336(!) directories, although the tarball misses a good chunk of them. The only subdirectories we really need are those with different type or size limits; splitting them up further by category only confuses things, since categories have no actual relevance (we get bugs against the icon theme api dealing with them, asking to explain what they're good for), and there is some per-directory overhead in our icon theme implementation.
• Add a dedicated place for symbolic icons in hicolor. That would be 'symbolic' subdirectory with type Scalable and Size 16. Currently, people install symbolic icons in hicolor/scalable/actions, but that directory has a nominal size of 128, while symbolic svgs typically have a size of 16.
• Clarify the expected behavior when wrongly sized icons are installed in theme directories. Currently, the spec does not really say much about the relevance of the Size key for theme directories.