Generated files in version control (was: Re: Why is C90 enforced in KDE?)

[Nicolás Alvarez]

2015-12-06 17:28 GMT-03:00 Ingo Klöcker <kloecker at kde.org>:
> On Sunday 06 December 2015 13:34:51 Nicolás Alvarez wrote:
>> If it was up to me, there wouldn't even be .png icons in git version
>> control, they would be generated from their .svg files at compile
>> time.
>
> You do not seem to be aware of the fact that (AFAIK) the PNGs were hand-
> optimized by Nuno and others. I'm pretty sure that Nuno would personally
> hunt down each and everyone of us ignorant non-designers if we replaced
> the PNGs with auto-generated ones. :-)

I am aware that Nuno manually chose rendering engine and scaling
method for every individual Oxygen icon based on seeing which one gave
(subjectively) better results. That is not documented anywhere, and we
can't modify an icon and re-render it with the same quality unless we
ship Nuno's brain along with oxygen-icons.tar.bz2 (I don't think there
is any working implementation of RFC1437), because we don't know what
rendering engine, scaling method, and bitmap modifications were used.

If I want to make an Oxygen-style icon for my application's document
format, I can copy the .svg for an existing file format icon, put my
application logo, leave the paper, and... who knows how to produce the
magic .png from that. No documentation, no script.

I could even bring licensing into the discussion. What is the
"preferred form for modification" (in the GPL sense) of oxygen icons?
What is the Corresponding Source (in the GPL sense) of the .png files?

-- 
Nicolás