On May 25, 2009, at 5:25 PM, Krzysztof Kosiński wrote:
OK, I wasn't correct. There is no obvious and easy way in the GTK documentation to do this. One can use gtk_icon_theme_add_builtin_icon, but it can't be used to add scalable builtin icons, we'd have to re- render them in response to logical icon size changes. If we had a list of icons and logical sizes at which they are used, this could work.
Guess what?!?!?!?
THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT WE DO!!!!
That is, the code that you declared dead and useless does just such work. So your removal combined with these statements seems to be a clear indication that you did not fully grasp all that was going on in that source file.
Again, the current icons.svg file code *does* work with icons, falling back, etc.
It does work but:
- It seems I have to use sp_icon_new instead of
gtk_image_new_from_icon_name. Thus GtkImageMenuItem, GtkAction, etc. won't work correctly unless they are subclassed.
That is true...
However if you read through our source code you'll see that things *are* properly subclassed. Also that is much of the reason for using a factory design pattern. It makes things easy. (Please read up on at least the most common design patterns).
- At present the fallback order is a bit off. (icons.svg from user
folder should be first, themed icons second, and system icons.svg last; currently it is themed icons, user icons.svg, system icons.svg, unless there were some changes I didn't notice)
Yes, the order does need a bit of tuning. If you look to some of the XDG discussions you'll see that it was something I was asking for assistance with before the other distractions and code changes came up. I believe I also stressed that XDG compatibility with you explicitly.
WE CAN NOT USE LIBRSVG TO GET FULL FEATURES OF SVG!!!!
Yes, but I think that full features of SVG are not necessary for icons. Everyone else is confined to the librsvg subset and they create excellent artwork. It should not be a major problem for us to stick to it. Another thought: if Inkscape's icons are not librsvg-compliant, they are less useful, because people can't reuse them or their modified versions in desktop themes. So using librsvg, even it's not as technically appealing as reusing our canvas renderer, has a few real advantages (speed, memory footprint, icon compatibility with desktop themes, convenient APIs).
Well... that is your opinion. The opinion of many others is the opposite. Also keep in mind that you have only really been testing with the latest versions of librsvg; older versions have more problems but still are in use.
Speed is a non-factor with caching. Memory is a minimal factor due to many things. Icon compatibility is easily achieved with other means that do not dumb things down 100%. Convenient API's is really a red herring, and not a pertinent factor here.
Again, on this point you are effectively telling all the artists that they *MUST* work with a constrained, distro-specific set of restrictions. Adoption of such restrictions really should be up to the individual using artist to decide on a job-by-job basis.
An exception to this is filter icons: of course they can't be rendered by librsvg, and there is no reason for them to be themable because they are just illustrations of the filters' functions, so they should still be rendered by Inkscape.
Here is a point of software engineering. It is usually better to have a simple codepath that supports the needed functionality instead of special-casing various one-off cases, especially if there get to be more of those. Keep It Simple Stupid, or KISS, is how that is often referred to.
Please keep in mind that not everyone will be running the latest and greatest versions of all libraries. You *must* keep cross-platform support in mind for any code work you do on Inkscape. One of our key promises is good cross-platform support.
I agree, the icons need testing on more versions of librsvg
Finally I'll point out one additional feature proposal that you seem to have missed out on catching. The icon workflow, including the icon preview, is being tweaked to include previews rendered by engines such as librsvg. We don't want to compile this in where we can avoid it (since it does avoid an extra dependency on another external library). But the good news is that we can do this in such a way as to support more than just GNOME.
Remember that KDE has it's own very nice SVG rendering. Recent versions of KDE have really jumped ahead in SVG use. So given that the icon workflow is being tweaked to use librsvg through an external hook where possible will simultaneously open it up to support KDE's SVG rendering. Personally I'll be using it with three previews side- by-side: Inkscape internal, librsvg (for GNOME) and KDE.
Oh, and in case you didn't know, many of the KDE artists use Inkscape to do their work in.