Lots of “More Suggestions” items in the Apps Lens are represented by a default icon

[Paweł Stołowski]

Lots of “More Suggestions” items in the Apps Lens are represented by a default icon, when an icon is available that could be used. For example search for “seer”. The result “Comic Seer” is represented by a default icon, however when you open the preview an icon is shown that could be used in the results.

[Paweł Stołowski (stolowski)]

Unfortunately there is no easy fix to this as it's not really a "bug". The icons for search results in "More Suggestions" apps are obtained from two sources:
- /usr/share/app-install/icons - installed with app-install-data package, contains around 1100 icons, I guess only for apps that never change after release.
- ~/.cache/software-center/icons - contains icons cached by Software Center, only for apps that were browsed in SC (requires SC to be run at least once to have any icons).
If required icon is not present in any of the above, search results default to a generic icon.

Now, the previews use different approach; as preview needs more info about application, app lens obtains application details from software-center-dbus (via a DBus call, spawned on demand) and the details include an url of the real icon (a remote http uri pointing to an ubuntu server).

Possible solutions:
1. App Lens calls GetAppDetails() for all More Suggestions results that don't have icons in /usr/share/app-install/icons or SC cache, and gets uris of remote icons; this of course means a lot of extra applications details data (which we don't need) over DBus.
2. software-center-dbus implements a new dbus call that returns icon uris only.

Unfortunately, both 1 & 2 mean that software-center-dbus process (in python, a heavy one - approx. 413M VIRT / 137M RES memory) would be started more often or would running most of the time (currently it's started only on-demand when app preview is displayed, and disappears after a few minutes of inactivity).

3. Anything else?