Krzysztof Kosiński wrote:
Joel Holdsworth wrote:
You might be interested in these two videos http://blip.tv/file/1075329 http://blip.tv/file/1077148
Here the guy uses a Ruby script to automate rendering of all the PNGs out of a larger SVG canvas.
That's a different animal altogether. If GdkPixbuf supports SVG on Windows, we don't need PNG renders at all, because we can use our SVG icons directly in the theming mechanism. If it doesn't, we have to ship PNG renders. Integrating the rendering into the build process is rather easy, and I have even wrote a custom build system in Perl that renders an icon theme to PNGs of several sizes, but it would be problematic for Windows users. For now I think putting the PNG icons in SVN is the best option, because SVG support in GdkPixbuf is not a part of core GTK, so the logical guess is that it's not supported by default.
Another minor note is that Ruby isn't the best language for build automation, because it's not installed by default in most Linux distros, whereas Perl and Python are.
Wow, this brings back memories of many different threads in the mailing list archives. As a reminder some of the issues were:
1) Dogfood. People wanted to use our renderer for the icons as a visual test and because other renderers weren't up to par. Perhaps a visual test isn't necessary now that we have a visual testing framework that is run regularly. Perhaps other svg renderers have equaled ours?
2) Startup time. IIRC startup times were shown to be significantly faster loading icons from a single file.
3) Convenience for icon designers. Being able to look over a whole theme and judge consistency and share gradients and such was a huge benefit. So I'm sure people would be happy if there was a workflow for generating the individuals from the composite.
I'm sure more discussion points could be turned up if you look through the archives. And yes, it is very likely that many have become irrelevant. Just so that your mindful that this isn't the first or second time someone has attempted to split out the icons and met with resistance.
Aaron Spike