Re: Icons for components - future

[Michael Meeks <michael ximian com>]

Hi,

On 6 Mar 2001, Miguel de Icaza wrote:
> As already said on the list, we are not adding new features to Bonobo
> right now (I personally think that the component selector should be  
> itself an external component, but that is a different story ;-).     
  
        Well; we can take it out of bonobo I suppose in the future, just a
matter of splitting bonobo/components/selector and making it genuinely
useful.

> I read your patch and I am not sure how you are loading the icon.  I 
> get the feeling that a fully qualified pathname should be included as
> the property instead of just the icon name.
  
        I think the problem is quite widespread. We want a decent, 
standard, sensible way of encoding pixmaps. I am not a big fan of my
current 'code it strangely using hex' approach - however this does have   
the minor merits of working, being deployed, and some sort of ad hoc
standard.
  
        Mostly we want to add icons to the oaf files, for bonobo controls,
but it would be nice to have a standard way of dealing with icons - so    
here is my preferred solution for the future:
  
        * Represent the icon/pixbuf as a CORBA structure:
  
        struct Bonobo_Pixbuf {
                Bonobo_Pixbuf_Colorspace color_space;
                long    x, y, rowstride;
                boolean has_alpha;
                sequence<octet> data;
        };
  
        * Store this in oaf properties as an XML serialized structure
using the Any <-> XML code.              
  
        * Possibly use this XML representation in the UI code - depending
on how much pixbuf fiddling people will do with the Gnome 2.0 code,
optionaly we could do:
  
        addPixbuf (in string id, Bonobo_Pixbuf pixbuf);
  
        etc. I would anticipate that the format of 'data' would be that of
the native GdkPixbuf to minize copying operations etc.

	Anyway, thanks for the patch Sebastian.
  
        Regards,
  
                Michael.

-- 
 mmeeks gnu org  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot