[PATCH 02/48] Added new icon build rule

[Joel Holdsworth]

On 22 March 2010 at 15:37 Alexandre Julliard <julliard at winehq.org> wrote:

> Joel Holdsworth <joel at airwebreathe.org.uk> writes:
>
> >> I still think that having to commit 10 source files per icon is not
> >> acceptable, even with subdirectories.
> > I agree it is a lot of source files, but I don't see that that's a problem
> > if
> > they're stored neatly within a resources subdirectory. user32.dll has a lot
> > of
> > images, but that's not a problem for this reason. In fact by creating
> > resources
> > subdirectories surely I'm tidying? because it unclutters the mix of
> > resources
> > and source code in many dlls.
> >
> > The issue is that the 9 images are never going to go away - a full XP icon
> > has
> > at least 9 independant hand crafted images to go into it. Vista and 7 icons
> > have
> > even more.
>
> As far as I understand it's possible to store everything in a single SVG
> file. I don't know if tools like inkscape can support this directly, but
> it's all XML so a simple perl wrapper should be able to do anything we
> need.
 
It is possible with a multipage SVG (which Inkscape doesn't support yet, and
can't be rendered RSVG) and embedded bitmaps for the hand tweaked images (which
are at beta stage AFAIK). That's bad news, but these obstacles can be overcome
by me spending a lot of my time (which these days is in really short supply)
writing scripts in Perl, but that would require me to use Perl (which I don't
know and would have to learn)*, and could take several more months.

It would also require a dependancy on some kind of command line image handling
tool like ImageMagick or Python image stuff (which I'm sure you won't like)
because RSVG only renders to 32-bit, but we need to output to 4-bit and 8-bit
without screwing up these palette (which may be very hard).

The end result would be 1 file rather than 9, but in a format which is harder
even than ico for artists to work with given the state of todays tools.

* I do use python though - is there any in the project?

Speaking personally: This project has already taken me over a year to get this
far, and after all this painstaking work I'm really keen to get it out to the
world, but I'm so short of time right now, and it feels like every time I try
and submit, there are more of these never ending hoops to jump through. From my
perspective I won't abandon this work that I've spent so much time on, but it's
becoming this never ending nightmare of obstacles. I'm looking at the big
picture and wondering; is turning a very minor mess of 9 files into 1 per icon
really the best use of my time, when I could be productively contributing to
areas of need within the FOSS world that will have a real effect on FOSS users.

I want to keep pursuing this and I respect your opinion very much as the veteron
maintainer of this project. Your uncompromising comittment to quality has
resulted in an excellent and long standing project, it's just that I'm finding
the lack of flexibility quite hard to cope with. Is there no way we could
compromise on this?

Joel
 
 
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