Hi-Resolution Icons

[Rik]

2/13/15

Octave ships with just a single fixed size icon (png or ico) and an svg 
for a scalable version.  Many operating systems want more fixed sizes in
order to display an attractive version of the icon for different
situations.  There is a bug report about this at
https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?37062.  The issue has already been solved,
twice, on the bug report. 

One way is to create the icons "by hand" and store them under Mercurial
version control.  This uses about 450 KB of disk space.  I just checked the
price of a 1TB hard drive on Amazon and found $55 so this solution costs
.$0.00002 dollars.  Of course, every time the logo changes the icons would
have to be re-done, but re-branding happens every few years at most.

The second way is to base everything off the scalable icon format svg and
create the necessary sizes algorithmically.  This is less "wasteful" of
disk space, but it requires two new additions to the build dependencies for
Octave: icotool and rsvg-convert.  Maybe this isn't such a problem because
only developers need to worry about this, whereas users can download a
tarball with the files already generated.  Distribution maintainers like
Debian would need to add these to the "build-dep" target for apt-get.

I don't care which solution we use, but lets pick one ahead of the 4.0
release so we can have nice looking icons.  Please vote, and or comment on
the mailing list about which one is preferable.

--Rik