Re: Image collections

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Bill Haneman <bill haneman sun com> writes:

> Matthias said:
> 
> > Owen asked me to post some information regarding bug 65902 here, in
> > the hope to get some feedback on the proposed API.
> > 
> > 
> > That bug is concerned with image file formats which contain not just a
> > single image, but a collection of related images. The most prominent
> > example is the Windows .ICO format, which may be met on the web in the
> > form of favicon files. Web browsers need to select an appropriately
> > sized image from the favicon file. 
> 
> I would think that this would also be a nice means of harmonizing the
> handling of gtk+ stock icons with replacement/themed icon sets, since at
> the moment the stock icons are compiled into a header file, and
> replacements via RC-file theming must be provided as separate image
> files.  IMHO neither of these cases is ideal, providing a common format
> for multi-images, which could be used by gtk_icon_factory instances as
> well, would seem more flexible and efficient.  It appears to me that at
> present there are two icon sets in memory whenever the default set is
> overridden, since we can't unload the hard-coded ones.

* This is actually unrelated to the idea of image collections. Image
  collections are basically meant to deal with multisize/multidepth 
  image formats, not handle arbitrary collections of images differing
  in arbitrary manners.

* There is no extra inefficiency from the built in icons assuming
  reasonable OS handling - while they are in the library, they'll
  never be paged off disk if not used.

* I've been discussing making GtkStock use the general icon theme
  mechanism with Alex/Havoc. Alex doesn't think GnomeIconLoader
  is ready for inclusion in GTK+ yet, so it most likely won't
  happen for 2.2. But its the general direction.

* If we want to tackle the issue of sharing memory usage for
  themed stock icons, we should do it by tackling the issue
  for general icon themes. Its harder for icon themes than
  for the GTK+ stock icons simply because there are so many
  icons in an icon theme you don't want to store them all
  uncompressed as we do for the GTK+ stock icons.

Regards,
                                        Owen