Hi Joel,
I'm piping up not because I can speak for Alexandre--I can't--but to express that you're not the only one interested in seeing this work merged.
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.
You could also ask for help. I too am not a Perl hacker, but there are some on list.
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).
ImageMagick, at least, is very commonly available. In my personal opinion, adding a dependency on it to build the icons doesn't seem onerous. We have stranger requirements elsewhere in the build.
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.
Perhaps, but assuming a script to generate .icos from the SVG exists, it seems that a mirror script to create the SVG from its source files mightn't be too hard. Given such a script, artists wouldn't need to reinvent that particular wheel, and at some point the need for it should disappear (assuming Inkscape implements support for multipage SVGs.)
- I do use python though - is there any in the project?
There isn't.
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.
We feel your pain ;-) Think of it this way: assuming you take the time to do this right, the next contributor won't have as steep an obstacle to deal with. You're not just contributing artwork--which are much appreciated, believe me--you're improving the workflow for future artists.
Cheers, --Juan