Comment 3 for bug 489695

I’d second this request. python-distutils-extra supports the installation of icons in the standard paths: Icons you place under data/icons/<size>/<category>/ are installed in the right place under /usr/share/icons/hicolor/. You can then just use the icon names instead of full icon paths for desktop files, window icons and the logo in the about dialog.

So I’d suggest moving data/media/icon.png to data/icons/16x16/apps/<projectname>.png and data/meda/logo.svg to data/icons/scalable/apps/<projectname>.svg. (This is what I normally do with a fresh quickly project.) I think logo.png is then obsolete.

Advantages:
 * uses standard location for icon files
 * automatically chooses correct size: Especially the window and menu icons should be available in a scalabe format. E.g. Ubuntu Netbook Remix uses much larger icons for its custom starter (as does GNOME3 Shell), and Compiz uses large variants of the window icon for overlays for window switching. Currently, the tiny icon.png is used, which results in a ugly blurred icon.

Disadvantages:
 * Icons are only available after installation. (I don’t know enough about PyGTK, maybe one could hack some icon lookup magic to use the local files when running the project uninstalled.)

Other side effects:
 * The update_desktop_file in setup.py is no longer necessary when using just the program name as icon name.