Sorry I missed the whole icons thread, but I've been dealing with family things the past couple weeks... I'm back now though.
Both you and Jon have raised good points.
I think it makes sense to use SVG files as icons in the same way as PNGs or XPMs or whatever other formats we also support for icons.
To my mind though, having a single icons.svg is not a bad thing either, and for right now there are indeed performance reasons to do so. For the immediate future I think the standard icons should ship in icons.svg.
But we should offer a range of options for third-party icon sets.
Probably we should support at least:
* #icon-name-goes-here in an SVG file
* icon-name-goes-here.{svg,png,xpm} or whatever in a directory
* icon-name-goes-here.{svg,png,xpm} etc in a .jar file
Also I think we should take better advantage of the standard Gtk icon themeing facilities.
Regardless, right now I have my hands full with the AST code and other projects so I can't implement it myself. If someone wants to come forward with a more detailed design proposal for this (and maybe some patches?) they are strongly encouraged to do so.
-mental