Should I place an icon in /usr/share/pixmaps?

[Soren Stoutner]

I maintain the electrum package, which I inherited from another developer.
The package installs the program icon into both:

/usr/share/icons/hicolor/128x128/apps/
/usr/share/pixmaps/

On my system, very few icons exist in /usr/share/pixmaps/. From what I have
read, that location is deprecated.

My question is, does anything still use /usr/share/pixmaps/ instead of looking
in /usr/share/icons/hicolor/128x128/apps/? If not, I would like to remove the
/usr/share/pixmaps, but I don’t want to do so if it will break anything.

[Sven Hoexter]

On Mon, Nov 04, 2024 at 11:34:58AM -0700, Soren Stoutner wrote:

Hi,

Post by Soren Stoutner
My question is, does anything still use /usr/share/pixmaps/ instead of looking
in /usr/share/icons/hicolor/128x128/apps/? If not, I would like to remove the
/usr/share/pixmaps, but I don’t want to do so if it will break anything.

https://specifications.freedesktop.org/icon-theme-spec/latest/#directory_layout

It's still mentioned in the theme spec, but I also believe technically
the desktop enviroments following the xdg specs look for the hicolor
fallback theme, and thus find icons there.

Now you might encounter issues if you only ship a single resolution
file and the user setup does not use that exact resolution. I'm also
not sure what the default is for contempory desktop environments.

If someone has more information on that topic I'd be also interested
to here it. For vym I currently ship only a 48x48 png icon in the
hicolor theme.

Sven

[Soren Stoutner]

Post by Sven Hoexter
Now you might encounter issues if you only ship a single resolution
file and the user setup does not use that exact resolution. I'm also
not sure what the default is for contempory desktop environments.

Thanks for the information. Indeed, Electrum only ships one icon size
(128x128). This same icon ends up in both places, but I can see scenarios
where something can’t find it in

/usr/share/icons/hicolor/128x128/apps/electrum.png

but can't find it in

/usr/share/pixmaps/electrum.png

To be safe, I think I will leave both copies.