panel icon resizing

[Brian J. Tarricone]

hi all-

this is somewhat of a question for jasper, but i wouldn't mind the 
chance to generate a little discussion...

the other night someone was complaining in #xfce that my desktop menu 
plugin was causing the panel to increase in size when added.  in 
debugging the problem, i noticed that, when the panel is set to 'large', 
some of the icons were rather small, while some were the 'correct' size.  
i tracked this to a call to gdk_pixbuf_new_from_file() in panel/icons.c 
that i had apparently missed when i was doing the theming conversion.  
or perhaps i left it as-is on purpose; i don't remember.  at any rate, i 
changed it to use xfce_load_themed_icon() (note: that function first 
checks for an absolute path and, if it finds one, falls back to 
gdk_pixbuf_new_from_file()).  the win here (IMO), is that you get a 
properly-scaled icon, so all launcher icons are the same size (i.e., the 
size of the panel).  the downside is obvious - some smaller icons may 
not scale upward so well, as jens pointed out to me earlier today in 
#xfce-dev.

personally i think the icons should be scaled, and if some don't look 
good when scaled upward, they should be replaced.

options:
1) keep the current behavior.  all icons are scaled to the current panel 
size.
2) go back to what was (may have been) the old behavior.  load icons at 
their native size (and presumably scale down if they are larger than the 
panel).
3) *sigh* -  provide a "scale launcher icons" pref.

thoughts?

	-brian