Gnome needs a way for applications to get icons and thumbnails for files. This can be used in the file selector and other dialogs. The current code in Nautilus is designed to be used for this.
Gnome applications in general and in particular any new implementation of a file selector will often need to show icons for files. These icons are normally mime-based and/or thumbnails. Preferably the same icons that the file manager uses should be used.
The following are the requirements of an implementation:
Such an implementation already exists in Nautilus, and was designed to be split out to a common library.
The current code depends on GnomeIconLoader which is currently in gnome-desktop. A good place for the new code would be in libgnomeui, but the dependency on GnomeIconLoader does somewhat complicate that.
Possible solutions are:
There have been proposals to use the new icon theme specification and code based on GnomeIconLoader in Gtk+ for stock icons. If we put GnomeIconLoader into libgnomeui in the future we might end up with duplicated functionallity. This could be solved by having the libgnomeui API be a backwards compatible wrapper for the Gtk+ API.
None yet.
None yet.