5º The last argument is not new. I would like to hear a real advantage of a monolithic file. No themeing system that I know is based upon a monolithic file. Some times they try to reduce it us much as possible, but at the end you have several files. Sorry, I forgot wallpapers: they are monolithic files ;) If there is no real advantage my four other arguments should win (yeah!!)
Hello,
1 am not very familiar with programming environnement, nor i am familiar with programming software so my thoughts are not guru-like.
But i am used to install software and configuring it. I (it is just my thinking) find much more easy when everything is in a single configuration file (or one easy-to-find-file for each group) For exemple in apache : one monolithic file for everything , proftpd also, php also.
I think it is easier to manage one file for the icons, because you know where to search when someting is going wrong, and it is something that allmost everybody won't look for, so if it is a very large file, that doesn't matter. it would be difficult to find out what is going wrong in a directory with directories nested with dozens of icons. For exemple in kde and the themes of kde, i don't know where to look (i found the icons'directories ) when some icons are missing fore some themes. Where to put them ? how to name them ? what size ? etc...
Another solution for an easy configuration would be to name the icons in the preferences.xml files (and then you could change an icon with another one, just writing its name, but if preferences.xml is very large,(Dozens of icons name), it would be very hard to manage to change things (for document size, etc... the bulia-world-work).
And in svg you can add png icons because images can be embed in svg. they are rendered normaly. ?? I think that doing that point with an svg method is quite clever because the aims of inkscape is svg, so it uses its proper methods and don't rely on something else. Another point is that svg (and xml) are W3C standards, that means that they are not plateform dependants and dont rely on gtk gtk+ gdb or whatever. An svg file will open on every machine (done once run many ???).
<free thinking> I switch to inkscape in the fork with sodipodi because inkscape is going towards full svg compliance (and not svg + specials methods that would break normal svg viewer-designer).
I switch all the windows machine in my office to run with open office, not because it is free, but because it is complete xml.
I do think that trying to use standard open methods is the only way to 'manage' what we will be able to do in 1 year, 5 years, 10 years.
</free thinking> Well i am not contributing in coding so.. that is just words, but i think for users that simple configurations methods help in switching to new software, even if they are less 'powerfull'. I prefer to use some software where i understand what is happening, where it is happenning and how i could change if (or why i can't).
well wordy mail but such a good peace of work deserves it.
very nice work every one.
hervé