Elementary prevents pidgin from showing status in the tray

[Stephan Sokolow]

Pidgin is a bit picky about its icons and, if the theme doesn't provide icons under the non-standard names it uses, it falls back to the application icon in all cases.

This means that, while using the Elementary outside something like Unity (for example, as the inherited base for the default icon theme on Lubuntu), users don't see any indication of held messages or their current account status.

The simplest fix is to symlink the panel/*/user-*-panel.svg icons to status/*/pidgin-tray-*.svg, matching the names for the default set in /usr/share/pixmaps/pidgin/tray/hicolor/. Elementary doesn't have an icon for when there's a message waiting, but falling through to the default application icon will do perfectly well for that case.

In case anyone stumbles across this looking for a quick fix, I wrote a little script to fix it on my system. I'm attaching it, but here's the copy on GitHub in case I find and fix any bugs:

https://gist.github.com/1815976

[Danielle Foré (danrabbit)]

Instead of adding app-specific icon names to elementary, I think it would be more appropriate to file a bug report against pidgin asking it to use app-agnostic icon names.

[Stephan Sokolow (ssokolow)]

I can try, but I really don't want to end up caught between you guys if they decide to take issue with standardizing icon names from an Ubuntu-specific technology that doesn't even run in non-mainline DEs like LXDE.

[Stephan Sokolow (ssokolow)]

Here's the Pidgin bug. If you and the Pidgin devs can't come to an agreement on how to move forward, on your heads be it.

http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/14981

[Danielle Foré (danrabbit)]

I'm not sure where you get anything about Ubuntu-specific naming. There are icon names outlined in the FreeDesktop.org spec here http://standards.freedesktop.org/icon-naming-spec/icon-naming-spec-0.4.html

"user-away"
"user-idle"
"user-offline"
"user-online"

These are all standardized names. I wouldn't recommend adding Ubuntu's "-panel" suffix. But I would recommend supporting the "-symbolic" suffix only for the panel icon.

If the standard doesn't include states that pidgin requires, I would suggest conforming to the standard convention as in

"user-busy"

[Stephan Sokolow (ssokolow)]

Hmm. I was pulling an accidental all-nighter when I read that so I'm not sure whether I missed those or just somehow confused the Ubuntu-specific "-panel" with the icons names as a whole.

Either way, thanks for correcting me.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.