Keep track of upstream adwaita-icon-theme

[Amr-Ibra]

Since Yaru is now syncing with upstream adwaita-gtk and gnome-shell theme, I think it would be a good idea to also keep an eye on upstream adwaita-icon-theme.

adwaita-icon-theme mostly contains symbolic and action icons that correspond to code changes in gnome-shell, gnome-control-center and the rest of gnome apps. In every gnome development cycle, adwaita-icon-theme adds, fixes, or enhances its symbolic icons in order to reflect the code changes in the gnome stack. adwaita-icon-theme does not contain app icons since gnome apps ship their own icons.

An example to elaborate:
In the 3.33 development cycle, gnome added new battery icons in order to better represent the battery charge states: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/adwaita-icon-theme/issues/6

That has resulted in:

• 21 new battery icons and moving the legacy battery icons to a legacy folder: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/adwaita-icon-theme/commit/377044f755c3ec994f661d787f50e633487b929d

• Code changes in gnome-shell to use the new icons, if available, and fall back to the existing icon names for compatibility with older icon themes: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/commit/bd18313d125aa1873c21b9cce9bbf81a335e48b0

Without reflecting the new change in Yaru¹, gnome-shell would still be falling back to the legacy icons, and not showing a better charge state as a result.
¹ #1482

Also, a question:
Does an app (or Yaru itself) fall back to adwaita-icon-theme if a requested icon is not found in Yaru?

Here is the gnome-stencils.svg as a reference:
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/adwaita-icon-theme/blob/master/src/symbolic/gnome-stencils.svg

[clobrano]

Hi @Amr-Ibra, this is a good observation.
When we don't see this updates by ourselves, we usually rely on notifications from Ubuntu desktop guys or other contributors for such important changes. Unfortunately none of us has the time to keep a constant check of these changes and the repo is not organized to get them automatically.

We could keep this ticket opened to discuss a repo change to get automatic info about this (submodules?)

[Feichtmeier]

Wouldn't this be something to be made with your GitHub Actions? @clobrano
Ofc not for 20.04 😆

[Feichtmeier]

I made some Java github actions on my repos, maybe I can do this too

We could use the checkout action on the GitHub gitlab mirror of adwaita
https://github.com/GNOME/adwaita-icon-theme

But I'm not sure if we want so many more files in our repo.
The src folder should be enough

[Feichtmeier]

@didrocks since we've talked about this, I thought it could not hurt to assign you 👼 Feel free to unassign ofc ^^

[Feichtmeier]

@Jupi007 if you have time, maybe you could use your github action knowledge to create an action for checking the adwaita icon theme for changes?

[Jupi007]

I'll have try 👍

[Jupi007]

@Feichtmeier I see two way to do that:

• Use the current Github workflow, but that will need to import a lot of files into this repo.
• Or create a new workflow which will only do a list file of Adwaita icons.

Which one do you prefer?

[Feichtmeier]

I think the most critical icons are the symbolics and the file name changes. We don't need the whole adwaita icon set
But I don't know if this is checkable in an action
Basically only the "gnome-stencils.svg" file is needed to be checked plus/or the exported symbolic subfolder

[Jupi007]

I can try to do an action which list all exported symbolic Adwaita icon. I think it is the best way to have just new files and rename notifications.

[emyoulation]

There's linkrot for the SVG of the stencil. (It was moved to 'legacy'.)

A good link for the webpage in July 2021 is:
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/adwaita-icon-theme/-/blob/master/src/symbolic/gnome-stencils-legacy.svg

The file Permalink:
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/adwaita-icon-theme/-/blob/720b4c23046368a5ebb963f47349f4fbc01fda6e/src/symbolic/gnome-stencils-legacy.svg