On Mon, Jul 07, 2008 at 10:06:28PM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> Chuck Anderson <cra@WPI.EDU> writes:
> > Where should icons for desktop files be stored? Some packages use
> > /usr/share/pixmaps. Others use subdirectories under
> > /usr/share/pixmaps (some directories are unowned too). Some use a
> > private directory under /usr/share/<name>. Still others use
> > /usr/share/icons/.
>
> Red Hat's rpmdiff tool has recently started to complain if desktop
> icon files are not underneath /usr/share/pixmaps/, so apparently there
> is policy to that effect somewhere. Unowned directories are certainly
> verboten too. I have no idea if there's any existing policy about your
> other questions.

Do you mean rpmlint? It seems most are under /usr/share/icons, so the
tool should probably be updated if that's true.

> One point: I'd suggest that we *not* require conversion of upstream
> icon files to a uniform file format, so long as what upstream supplies
> will work (ie, please no "thou shalt convert xpm to png" in the
> guidelines). Doing that would require BuildRequire'ing some image
> conversion package or other, which seems like a pretty heavyweight
> build dependency for hardly any real gain.

Ok, some more mystery behind this. There are several sets of
utilities to deal with icons and desktop files:

gtk2:

/usr/bin/gtk-update-icon-cache

desktop-file-utils:

Summary : Utilities for manipulating .desktop files
Description :
.desktop files are used to describe an application for inclusion in
GNOME or KDE menus. This package contains desktop-file-validate which
checks whether a .desktop file complies with the specification at
http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/, and desktop-file-install
which installs a desktop file to the standard directory, optionally
fixing it up in the process.

xdg-utils:

Summary : Basic desktop integration functions
Description :
The xdg-utils package is a set of simple scripts that provide basic
desktop integration functions for any Free Desktop, such as Linux.
They are intended to provide a set of defacto standards.
This means that:
* Third party software developers can rely on these xdg-utils
for all of their simple integration needs.
* Developers of desktop environments can make sure that their
environments are well supported
* Distribution vendors can provide custom versions of these utilities

The following scripts are provided at this time:
* xdg-desktop-menu Install desktop menu items
* xdg-desktop-icon Install icons to the desktop
* xdg-icon-resource Install icon resources
* xdg-mime Query information about file type handling and
install descriptions for new file types
* xdg-open Open a file or URL in the user's preferred application
* xdg-email Send mail using the user's preferred e-mail composer
* xdg-screensaver Control the screensaver

I was about to think "oh, xdg-utils must be the replacement/superset
of desktop-file-utils + gtk-update-icon-cache". It seems xdg-utils is
being used by KDE[1] but not GNOME[2]. And Oo.org isn't using
desktop-file-install but it is using gtk-update-icon-cache[3].

So my question is, in what direction is all of this stuff going, and
what should I use for my package[4] which just has two simple .xpm
icons, one of which is referenced by a relative path in the .desktop
file? I need to fix the relative path becuase desktop-file-install
doesn't like it, but the question is, how should I fix it?

[1]
http://cvs.fedoraproject.org/viewcvs/devel/kdebase/kdebase.spec?rev=1.333&view=auto

[2]
http://cvs.fedoraproject.org/viewcvs/devel/gnome-applets/gnome-applets.spec?rev=1.288&view=auto
http://cvs.fedoraproject.org/viewcvs/devel/gedit/gedit.spec?rev=1.157&view=auto

[3]
http://cvs.fedoraproject.org/viewcvs/devel/openoffice.org/openoffice.org.spec?rev=1.1567&view=auto

[4]
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=452749

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"Tom "spot" Callaway" <tcallawa@redhat.com> writes:
> On Mon, 2008-07-07 at 22:06 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
>> One point: I'd suggest that we *not* require conversion of upstream
>> icon files to a uniform file format, so long as what upstream supplies
>> will work (ie, please no "thou shalt convert xpm to png" in the
>> guidelines).

> I'm pretty sure that png and xpm are supported at a minimum, possibly
> other formats as well.

Hmmm ... using file(1) on an F-8 workstation I find this under
/usr/share/pixmaps and /usr/share/icons:

141 ASCII text (.theme and .icon extensions)
229 GLS_BINARY_LSB_FIRST (no idea what these are)
19 JPEG
8890 PNG
1 TIFF
12 TrueType font data (icon-theme.cache files)
16 X (.xpm)
686 XML (.svg)
236 gzip (.svgz)

How many of these icons actually work as expected is an interesting
question, but clearly there's a variety of formats that packages *think*
are supported. PNG is by far the majority though, and it looks like the
usages of the stranger formats are confined to a few packages each.
Maybe we *should* standardize on PNG here --- it appears that only a few
packages would be affected by a conversion requirement.

regards, tom lane

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On Mon, 2008-07-07 at 22:44 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> "Tom "spot" Callaway" <tcallawa@redhat.com> writes:
> > On Mon, 2008-07-07 at 22:06 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> >> One point: I'd suggest that we *not* require conversion of upstream
> >> icon files to a uniform file format, so long as what upstream supplies
> >> will work (ie, please no "thou shalt convert xpm to png" in the
> >> guidelines).
>
> > I'm pretty sure that png and xpm are supported at a minimum, possibly
> > other formats as well.
>
> Hmmm ... using file(1) on an F-8 workstation I find this under
> /usr/share/pixmaps and /usr/share/icons:
[snip]
> How many of these icons actually work as expected is an interesting
> question, but clearly there's a variety of formats that packages *think*
> are supported. PNG is by far the majority though, and it looks like the
> usages of the stranger formats are confined to a few packages each.
> Maybe we *should* standardize on PNG here --- it appears that only a few
> packages would be affected by a conversion requirement.

SVG is also definitely a reasonable alternative to png -- it gives
scalable icons which will be more important as we begin to get devices
with resolutions on both the high and the low end of the spectrum

Jeremy

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Chuck Anderson <cra@WPI.EDU> writes:
> On Mon, Jul 07, 2008 at 10:06:28PM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
>> Red Hat's rpmdiff tool has recently started to complain if desktop
>> icon files are not underneath /usr/share/pixmaps/, so apparently there
>> is policy to that effect somewhere.

> Do you mean rpmlint?

No, I meant rpmdiff, which is an internal tool that vets RPMs in various
ways (principally, but not solely, by comparison to the previous release
of the package --- hence the name). I got blindsided by the /pixmaps
check recently while rebuilding unixODBC for RHEL-5, so I'm quite sure
this is a new policy ...

regards, tom lane

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On Mon, 2008-07-07 at 22:33 -0400, Chuck Anderson wrote:

> > One point: I'd suggest that we *not* require conversion of upstream
> > icon files to a uniform file format, so long as what upstream supplies
> > will work (ie, please no "thou shalt convert xpm to png" in the
> > guidelines). Doing that would require BuildRequire'ing some image
> > conversion package or other, which seems like a pretty heavyweight
> > build dependency for hardly any real gain.

Supported formats for themed icons are xpm, png and svg. Thus, if you
install the icon below /usr/share/icons/hicolor/ it should be in one of
those formats. If you install it in /usr/share/pixmaps, it can really be
anything, but traditionally, that directory is for xpms. In the desktop
file, the icon should be either specified as a full path (including
extension) or as an icon name (without extension), the latter being
preferred.


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Matthias Clasen <mclasen@redhat.com> writes:
> Supported formats for themed icons are xpm, png and svg. Thus, if you
> install the icon below /usr/share/icons/hicolor/ it should be in one of
> those formats. If you install it in /usr/share/pixmaps, it can really be
> anything, but traditionally, that directory is for xpms. In the desktop
> file, the icon should be either specified as a full path (including
> extension) or as an icon name (without extension), the latter being
> preferred.

I guess the appropriate question for this list is "where is all that
documented?"

regards, tom lane

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On Mon, 2008-07-07 at 23:43 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> Matthias Clasen <mclasen@redhat.com> writes:
> > Supported formats for themed icons are xpm, png and svg. Thus, if you
> > install the icon below /usr/share/icons/hicolor/ it should be in one of
> > those formats. If you install it in /usr/share/pixmaps, it can really be
> > anything, but traditionally, that directory is for xpms. In the desktop
> > file, the icon should be either specified as a full path (including
> > extension) or as an icon name (without extension), the latter being
> > preferred.
>
> I guess the appropriate question for this list is "where is all that
> documented?"

http://standards.freedesktop.org/desktop-entry-spec/latest/
is the spec describing .desktop files

http://standards.freedesktop.org/icon-theme-spec/icon-theme-spec-latest.html
is the spec describing icon themes

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On Tue, Jul 08, 2008 at 12:29:15AM -0400, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> On Mon, 2008-07-07 at 23:43 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> > Matthias Clasen <mclasen@redhat.com> writes:
> > > Supported formats for themed icons are xpm, png and svg. Thus, if you
> > > install the icon below /usr/share/icons/hicolor/ it should be in one of
> > > those formats. If you install it in /usr/share/pixmaps, it can really be
> > > anything, but traditionally, that directory is for xpms. In the desktop
> > > file, the icon should be either specified as a full path (including
> > > extension) or as an icon name (without extension), the latter being
> > > preferred.
> >
> > I guess the appropriate question for this list is "where is all that
> > documented?"
>
> http://standards.freedesktop.org/desktop-entry-spec/latest/
> is the spec describing .desktop files
>
> http://standards.freedesktop.org/icon-theme-spec/icon-theme-spec-latest.html
> is the spec describing icon themes

Thanks for the pointer. I've decided to follow this spec for
installing upstream's xpm icons into /usr/share/icons/hicolor/{16x16,48x48}/apps.

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