Caching icon theme information, revisited

[Federico Mena Quintero]

Hi,

There was some discussion a while ago about creating binary files to
cache information about icon themes:

http://freedesktop.org/pipermail/xdg/2004-October/005140.html

The draft spec in that document is, to my knowledge, partially
implemented in GTK+ 2.5 --- from a quick look at the code, it couldn't
yet load the image data from the cache file.

That mail says that image data can be embedded in the cache file, but
doesn't really specify in which format.

I think it would be useful to store uncompressed image data directly in
the cache.  That data should be in some form that is readily useful to
applications:  GTK+ and GdkPixbuf would prefer pixels in RGBA ordering.
Then, when GTK+ mmap()s the cache file, it can make its pixbufs point to
the mapped image data and no copies would be made.

How does this sound?

  Federico