I’ve given up on python. Yes, my dear pythonists, it’s too hard for me to figure it out. PHP is just damn well documented and serves a lazy person like me well. Old dogs, new tricks, you know the drill.

The first incarnation of the script actually does something now. If called without parameters, it will fetch the naming spec, and render all master SVGs in the current directory that are in the spec. The context is handled automatically. The master SVG includes all the various sizes, that are defined as an id of the bounding rectangles in the lowest layer/group. If you don’t want to bother with the looney crackrock 256×256 size, just nuke that rectangle or move it into a different layer.

If you call the script with the -s foo parameter it will only render an icon named foo.svg into the undefined context. It will try to find it in the naming spec in the next incarnation. Then I need to figure out how to simplify maintaining the index.theme file.

• idea on opensuse.org

I wrote this entry after a long blog silence while Tango Friday was still in full force (mainly due to our awesome contributors rather than myself), filling up the holes in gnome icon theme.

Novell is hosting a cool event, descriptively named Hackweek. Every monkey, err, lizard(?) is free to hack on a cool free software project they never had the time to dive in during their regular work time. For the rare occasion when somebody may not know what to poke at, we have set up a nice idea pool site that hosts plethora of ideas to pursue during the week.

Personally I’d like to finally break away from the painful way we maintain our themes. Currently it’s more like creating 4 different icons rather than just tweaking an icon for a particular resolution. I will likely be spending more time figuring out how to work with xpath/DOM in python, as I’m sure people would eek at the idea of installing php5 to run command line scripts from me , but hopefully it will not be a complete failure.

If anyone feels like bringing some eye candy to the desktop, this one would be very appreciated too.