Re: Icons of program

[Christian Scholz <ruebe aachen heimat de>]

Hi!

> niche.)  And because of that, editing icon files will only be able to be done
> using apps that use imlib (until a second gnomeian decides to code the same
> sorts of routines.)

Maybe there is also a way if painting the images with any program and 
constructing the icon out of them with a special little gnome app.

> Also -- by defining a very specific icon file format, we are tying ourselves
> to a specific set of features.  Maybe we put everything we think we could
> possibly want into the image file -- but ten years from now (When everyone is
> actually using GNOME :-) we may find that there's something new that we want
> -- Maybe there's a new way to do 3D modeling that's small enough to make
> sensible icons or a new compression algorithm that is just world's better --
> and if our "icons" just contain pointers to the real image, (that is then
> decodable by some general image library like imlib..)  then all we have to do
> is start defining pointers to the new image type.  If we put the image data
> into the icon file along with the rest of the meta-info, we have to scrap the
> icon format and define version-2 (and 3 and 4....)

To put just a reference to an icon image into the info-File (or however it is stored)
serves multiple purposes:

1. Every user is able to define his own icon for this file
2. We can change the format of the actual icon without changing info-Files
   There might be a routine in gnome like get_icon() which will do the job
   of extracting it and the user has not to bother how this is done.
   But there should be a common format which this routine will give to the programmer.


-- christian