I'm the GUI maintainer for Lumiera, and we're generating our icons from SVGs. Each icon has to be specially adopted for each of the standard small sizes. We've adopted the "one canvas" icon workflow that Tango artists seem to be working toward. This is a video demonstrating the technique: http://blip.tv/file/1075329
That video didn't work for me.
Basically it involves drawing a basic icon, then tweaking it so that it looks good for different sizes. The SVG file is then "rigged" by putting in invisible bounding boxes marked with XML metadata (this can all be done in inkscape). We then have a python script* that then walks through the SVG, rendering all bounding boxes that it finds marked with the metadata.
Interesting. That might be worth trying to get into our build process. Care to have a go?
I find that a bit alarming. I'm sure he's working very hard, and doing good stuff, but I don't think Wine should be redrawing anything. Not when we have Tango around - it's designed to try create some consistency through standardisation. IMO standards are really good! - we use them if we possibly can.
The trouble is that the Tango icon set doesn't cover all the icons Wine needs. There's no Tango icon for regedit, for instance. While I agree with you that as a general rule, we should try to use available and applicable standards, sometimes there's something more expedient we could be doing.
The basic problem you bring up is an inconsistent look for icons. There are two general solutions proposed: use Tango icons, and use a combination of theming and fd.o icons. There's something simpler we can do too, which is to have someone draw all the Wine icons with a consistent look. They won't necessarily match whatever desktop environment you're running in, but least they'll be consistent with one another. This, I believe, is what Herve's trying to do.
But anyway, I'm not working on any of this stuff. Wine's driven by our contributors. If you'd like to see it done differently, by all means send patches! --Juan