[RFC] icon fix requires additional tools to build Octave from hg

[Mike Miller]

Maintainers,

Bug #37062 [1] is about providing the Octave logo in the file formats
and various resolutions required by a set of operating systems that we
want to support. This is fairly important with the upcoming release of
the GUI to support graphical launchers for Octave in a variety of
operating system graphical shells and desktop environments. I have
proposed a patch to address this, but it adds new external
dependencies on a couple of tools needed to create the icon file
formats. Adding build-dependencies is not a trivial change, so
bringing it here for more attention.

If I push the change I am suggesting (on the gui-release branch), the
SVG Octave logo becomes the source and other icon formats are build
artifacts. Building from the Mercurial repository will require two
free tools to do a complete build including all icon file formats,
icotool and rsvg-convert. These programs will be detected by configure
and used if they are found on the build host. They will be mandatory
for building the "dist" target, optional for all others. Built icons
(PNGs and ICOs) will be included in the source distribution but not in
the Mercurial repository.

Comments, objections, or suggestions for other ways to resolve this
bug are all welcome.

[1] http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?37062

Thanks,

-- 
mike