finding icons and emblems ...

[Michael Meeks <michael ximian com>]

Hi guys,

	Reading through the truss churn again, I'm struck by the amount of
effort we go to to find emblems / icons, going through several
directories and every combination of .svg, .png, .jpg, and then several
iterations of 'size' suffix.

	This process, it seems to me is horribly time consuming, I count over
1000 at a typical (default theme) startup.

	Worse - if you examine a theme such as ScaleableGorilla, you notice
immediately that there is a fair chunk of duplication:

	eg. these are all identical:

	gnome-application-x-ogg.svg,
	gnome-audio-ac3,
	gnome-audio-mpeg.svg,
	gnome-audio-ogg.svg,
	gnome-audio.svg,
	gnome-audio-x-pn-realaudio.svg

	and these:

	gnome-audio-x-bmw.svg
	gnome-audio-x-bmx.svg,
	gnome-audio-x-mod.svg
	gnome-audio-x-s3m.svg
	gnome-audio-x-stm.svg

	and these

	gnome-audio-ulaw.svg,
	gnome-audio-x-aiff.svg,
	gnome-audio-basic.svg,
	gnome-audio-x-pn-windows-acm.svg,
	gnome-audio-x-voc.svg
	gnome-audio-x-wav.svg

	Ok - and that's an incomplete list of the sound ones, images, fonts,
video, etc. suffer from this same problem.

	Notice that it's far worse than wasted space on disk and in-memory
having all these duplicates, the rendering time for a complex svg icon
is very noticable.

	So ... I propose we extend the XML theme description file, that maps
mime-type to .svg [ or png ] file, and that we fall back to the current
[ more flexible ] approach for unknown types.

	I propose something like:

<theme>
	<icons>
		<icon file="audio-notes" type="svg" sizes="72,96"/>
	</icons>
	<types>
		<type mime="application/x-ogg" icon="audio-notes"/>
		<type mime="audio/ac3" icon="audio-notes"/>
		<type mime="audio/mpeg" icon="audio-notes"/>
	</types>
<theme>

	With a similar scheme for emblems.

	How does that sound ?

	Regards,

		Michael.

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