Missing mimetype icons in gnome-icon-theme

[Lei Zhang]

In a default install of Ubuntu 11.10 with Unity, applications that follow the XDG icon theme spec to find icons for mime types do not work.

For instance, one such program is Chromium, which searches /usr/share/icons/[current_theme], /usr/share/icons/gnome, and /usr/share/icons/hicolor to look for icons. It will search these directories for foo.ext, where "ext" is svg, png, or xpm. If the mimetype is "image/png", it will search for image-png.ext, gnome-mime-image-png.ext, image-x-generic.ext, and unknown.ext.

In Ubuntu 10.04, icons like gnome-mime-image-png.svg are in the Humanity directory, which I believe to be the default theme, so it worked. If the user switches themes, then image-x-generic.png from /usr/share/icons/gnome is the fallback icon, so that worked.

However, in Ubuntu 11.10, the default theme is ubuntu-mono-dark, but all the icons are in the Humanity theme. As a result, searching in /usr/share/icons/ubuntu-mono-dark fails. In which case, it falls back to /usr/share/icons/gnome. However, /usr/share/icons/gnome contains very few icons, and we end up not finding any icons.

[Dmitry Shachnev (mitya57)]

Default installation of gnome-icon-theme contains only icons that are missing in humanity or ubuntu-mono. For full icons set, you should install gnome-icon-theme-full package.

I'm closing gnome-icon-theme bug, please add a task for chromium-browser or other applications that behave wrongly (and don't follow xdg icon-theme standard).

[Lei Zhang (thestig-google)]

So how are applications that need mime icons suppose to find them on a default install of Ubuntu 11.10? All the icons are in the Humanity folder. Are we expected to look there?

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Hey Lei, replying to your comments:

> However, in Ubuntu 11.10, the default theme is ubuntu-mono-dark, but all the icons are in the Humanity theme.

in fact themes can be "chained", the ubuntu-mono index.themes indexes load Humanity,gnome,hicolor so icons in all those directories will be used

> So how are applications that need mime icons suppose to find them on a default install of Ubuntu 11.10? All the icons are in the Humanity folder. Are we expected to look there?

do you use the gtk api for icons lookup? they should just do the right thing and look into the directories of the other themes listed in index.themes, which includes "humanity"

Now if you want chromium to just work with any theme you can probably add a Recommends on gnome-icon-theme-full which will give you the GNOME icons, those should be only required when using a theme which doesn't ship its own icons, which is probably the case if you use i.e the GNOME theme