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Re: Menu icons for packages



Last Saturday 12 March 2005 17:15, Bill Allombert was like:
> On Sat, Mar 12, 2005 at 03:23:03PM +0000, tim hall wrote:
> > OK, thanks for that information. For now, I just want to encourage
> > multimedia maintainers to include .pngs. So, can I take it that
> > /usr/share/pixmaps/ the best place to put them? I notice there are some
> > .svgs in here too. I ask because there is increasing usage of
> > /usr/share/icons/ by both GNOME and KDE apps (all .png & .svg AFAICT) and
> > /usr/share/images/ is being used by A/DeMuDi for wallpapers & splash
> > screens and the like.
>
> I think this more a question for debian-policy that to menu:

Ah, good, so I was on the right channel after all. ;-)

> Do we have guidelines about the placement of icons, images, etc. ?
> Currently we have at least
>
> /usr/share/icons/
> /usr/share/pixmaps/
> /usr/share/images/
> /usr/share/wallpapers/
>
> Should icons be in /usr/share/icons/ or in /usr/share/$pkg/ ?

At present we have:

menu icons in /usr/share/pixmaps/ - supposedly 32x32px .xpms, but this 
location is also used for .png and .svg sometimes located 
in /usr/share/pixmaps/$pkg. 
other icons in /usr/share/icons/ - sorted by Theme and then organised into 
sizes (16x16 -> 128x128) and 'scalable' (for.svgs). These appear to be for 
KDE and GNOME .desktop icons - they are all .pngs and .svgs, so by definition 
non-menu icons (?).
The other two locations you mentioned above are not currently used to hold 
icons. IMO putting icons anywhere other than /usr/share/pixmaps/ will have 
users searching all over their systems when they want to create custom 
launchers.

AFAICT The two most obvious locations for .png menu icons for applications are 
therefore: (in order)

/usr/share/pixmaps/$pkg.png
/usr/share/icons/Default/apps/$pkg.png
or even:
/usr/share/icons/$theme/apps/$pkg.png

Although the latter prevents having to provide duplicate resources, it seems 
potentially more complicated to me. On some level it's not an issue if the 
package references its icon correctly from the menu file, however few 
packages really do this. I remember searching for hours/days for the 
Rosegarden4 icon. It has to be user-findable as well.

> I don't have strong opinion either ways, but I would prefer consistency.

My suggestion:

Menu Icons
MUST have /usr/share/pixmaps/$pkg.xpm
MAY also have /usr/share/pixmaps/$pkg.png

This is already current practice for a lot of applications in AGNULA/DeMuDi. 
And it's very simple to explain.

cheers,

tim hall
http://glastonburymusic.org.uk



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