Building from hg currently requires two utilities, icotool and rsvg-convert. It would be a nice feature to be able to build and run Octave from hg if desktop icons aren't needed.

This means a new configure option, something like '--disable-icons' or '--disable-desktop-integration' to avoid even checking for these utilities and running the build steps. And missing one or both tools should warn and enable the option, same as we do for '--disable-docs'. And this would also disable the ability to run 'make dist', since the icons are part of the source distribution.