Some icons in gnome-system-monitor appear too large

Screenshot of issue

I confirm this bug using dapper 20060526 and gnome-system-monitor 2.14.3-0ubuntu1.

I have investigated this issue for gaim icon, the same should also apply for xchat icon.

The icon that is being used for gaim by g-s-m is /usr/share/icons/gnome/24x24/apps/gaim.png

The icon used in gnome icon theme is the same as the one provided by gaim upstream. According to the freedesktop.org icon theme specification standard icons for 3rd party applications belong in /usr/share/icons/hicolor. That's probably why you filed a bug to hicolor-icon-theme.

Suggested solution:

1) Remove /usr/share/icons/gnome/24x24/apps/gaim.png
=> bug task for package gnome-icon-theme
2) update the icon cache with following command: sudo gtk-update-icon-cache -f /usr/share/icons/gnome

3) According to the icon theme specification we should at least have a 48x48 png icon, therefore add 48x48 version of gaim.png found in /usr/share/pixmaps/gaim.png to /usr/share/icons/hicolor/48x48/apps.
=> Should be provided by package hicolor-icon-theme or gaim package itself.

4) change /usr/share/icons/hicolor/index.theme to contain the following:

[48x48/apps]
Size=48
Context=Applications
Type=Scalable
MinSize=16
MaxSize=48

This will make 48x48 png icon for gaim or other applications downscalable to 16x16 pixels for window list icons and 24x24 for menus and panel icons.
There is no need to provide 16x16, 22x22 or 24x24 versions in the theme when they are just downscales of the 48x48 icon, the downscaling will be done by the icon theme implementation of gnome/kde and gives the same result.

5) update the icon cache with following command: sudo gtk-update-icon-cache -f /usr/share/icons/hicolor

6) Start gnome-system-monitor and look at the size of gaim icon, it will be 16x16 now.

Is this still an issue with Edgy? I can't reproduce.

And Pascal: it'd be nice if you could point out why it is a bug in all of the components you added to the bug report.

@Daniel

The gaim icon in g-s-m seems to be fixed in Ubuntu Dapper LTS 6.06.
This is because tango-icon-theme-common provides a 16x16 icon for gaim now.

tango-icon-theme-common was released on 2006-05-11.
A dependency for it was added to ubuntu-desktop on 2006-05-14.

ubuntu-meta (0.114) dapper; urgency=low

  * Refreshed dependencies
  * Added tango-icon-theme-common to desktop-i386, desktop-amd64,
    desktop-powerpc, desktop-ia64, desktop-sparc, desktop-hppa

 -- Daniel Holbach <email address hidden> Sun, 14 May 2006 18:59:09 +0200

At the time I wrote my comment (2006-05-26) I did not have ubuntu-desktop installed because I removed some packages. This means I didn't have tango-icon-theme-common installed and explains why I saw larger gaim icon in g-s-m, because the icon then falls back to /usr/share/icons/gnome/24x24/apps/gaim.png.
Since then I have reinstalled the ubuntu-desktop meta package.

But the problem for xchat icon in g-s-m remains since no xchat icon is provided in tango-icon-theme-common, the icon falls back to /usr/share/icons/gnome/32x32/apps/gaim.png. Note that this icon is twice as big as expected.

Neither gaim or xchat are GNOME applications and should fall back to icons under /usr/share/icons/hicolor instead, their icons don't belong in gnome-icon-theme. And there are a lot of other applications that don't belong in gnome-icon-theme as well.

While it is a good thing ubuntu provides it's own icons for common applications, it is impossible to do this for every existing application.
Therefore each upstream application should provide it's basic icon(s) in /usr/share/icons/hicolor.
An upstream application should ideally only provide an 48x48 png icon if change 4) I described in my previous comment was made to the hicolor-icon-theme. This would allow downscaling to 16x16 icons needed by g-s-m.

That is why it's a bug in gnome-icon-theme, hicolor-icon-theme, gaim, xchat and a lot of other upstream applications.
At the time of writing I did not know better than to assign the bug to all these components, sorry for that.
And this point in time I believe it would be better to create a specification out of this since it affects lots of packages which makes it difficult to handle in bug reports.

Sébastien, what do you think about changing
[48x48/apps]
Size=48
Context=Applications
Type=Scalable
MinSize=16
MaxSize=48
in hicolor?

We shouldn't try to fix this in Dapper. Changes in Icon theme's index files have more implications than you expect in the beginning. We can try this change in Edgy, though I'm not entirely sure about it. (As it's a fix of the category 'quick and dirty' :-))) - no offense ment, we did this change in a couple of other places too.

FYI, this was fixed for gaim on edgy.

Marking Fix Released for gaim based on Alexandre Otto Strube's comment. I haven't personally confirmed this, but I hope it's okay, given that Alexandre could have made this change anyway.

I don't have this problem in Feisty with xchat.

Can someone confirm this? Can we close the report for xchat?

not a hicolor bug, the package only describe the categories it doesn't provide an icon, the applications are to modify if they don't ship the right format

Fixed in xchat 2.8.0

This is certainly fixed now. Most if not all of the 3rd party app icons have been removed from gnome-icon-theme upstream, and better versions shipped with the apps themselves now where appropriate (pidgin for example). I'm marking this as Invalid for gnome-icon-theme, based on this, and the fact the issue no longer occurs in newer versions of Ubuntu.