rename stylesheet.css to outline.css or similar

Can you explain more?

I didn't understand the documentation you link to, and how it affects this issue.

I moved the stylesheet from outline.css to stylesheet.css because if I were to follow all the conventions, all files within the module would start with 'outline'. This makes it difficult for the programmer (me) to select a file from the command line to edit. So, for me it is imperative that the file does NOT start with outline.

Would stylesheet-outline.css do?

According to this article on theming modules in Drupal 6, the file should be named outline.css. The information comes in the section "Adding a Stylesheet" (although there's a typo the first time he mentions css, the author effectively says that the file should be modulename.css).

The article says:
By convention, a module's main stylesheet should be named <module_name>.css (where <module_name> is the name of the module).

It is a convention, but what would the consequences be of not following it?
I don't think the stylesheet name is hardcoded anywhere. What we need is make the name transparent enough so that it can be overridden, if necessary.

If we were to follow all the conventions, we'd have a dozen files all starting with outline*, which is precisely what I'd like to avoid for ease of development.

How about structuring it the way views does, then, with a css folder under outline? Really, though, this isn't going to be a huge project with lots of files, so having one more file that follows the convention should not be a big issue. Another example of projects with many files, including css, is Organic Groups. The og.css file lives in the same og folder with a bunch of files and directories that start with the same 2 letters.

If the issue is that you are trying to use command line completion and don't want to match outline.css when you start typing a command, how about setting up a few aliases?

I don't think there are going to be any consequences, though, to not following the convention, other than making it a little bit more challenging for other contributors to follow what is going on. There also may be a tendency for other contributors to discount your excellent work when you don't follow the conventions.

Good comment.

If by alias, you mean setting a symbolic link (e.g. ln -s outline.module module), yes it would solve my problem :) Good idea. I'll do that.

I don't think we should assume that we'll only ever have one stylesheet file. I think I'd rather create a css directory and put outline.css there. This way we'll be set up for the long run should the need for more stylesheets (with images) arise.

So, I'd move stylesheet.css to css/outline.css. Is that ok?