apologies in advance if it sounds like a silly idea, but what if the SVG->PNG conversion is done once a user sets a new icon theme? one would only need a check to see if the proper PNG files are already there. That way the PNGs wouldn't need to be bundled at all, and the check could be done at startup to ensure there would be no bad surprises. however, this approach wouldn't be suitable if direct SVG->PNG conversion is not desirable, as in the case of individual size tweaking...
:r
Krzysztof Kosiński wrote:
We're still at the point where most of the serious icon artists create in SVG but have to deploy in multiple PNG versions per icon due to the runtime limitations of current display engines.
I don't think it's only because of the limitations. Even with perfect SVG support I would still deploy in PNG, because it's faster to load. And with multiple sizes looking different, there's little reason not to deploy PNG. The solution is not for Inkscape to behave differently than the rest of the desktop, but rather to improve librsvg, or modularize Inkscape enough that its renderer could replace librsvg (I doubt if that's possible, because librsvg is SAX-based).
Regards, Krzysztof Kosiński