App-specific icons -- best practice?

[Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>]

I'm working on a couple of apps here which, as per <http://live.gnome.org/ThemableAppSpecificIcons 
>, install their default app-specific hicolor icons into /usr/share/ 
<appname>/icons/hicolor.  So far so good.

That page also says "You can also provide icons for other themes in  
here, by installing them into a subdirectory for that theme".  My  
question is how best to do that, as so far I haven't seen anyone else  
doing it.  Specifically, we want to add icons for Sun's branded icon  
theme, Nimbus.

It seems like the correct approach would be to have the Nimbus theme  
itself install the icons into /usr/share/<appname>/icons/nimbus.   
However, should the user uninstall the app, that means they're still  
left with a /usr/share/<appname> directory lying around, which doesn't  
seem ideal.

The other obvious option would be for the theme to install the icons  
into /usr/share/icons/<themename>, just as if they were non-app- 
specific icons.  This gives the cleanest separation between theme and  
application, but seems to go against the spirit of what's described on  
the wiki.

The wording on the wiki actually initially gave me the impression that  
the application itself should install the icons for any additional  
themes, too-- but that's surely not what's really being suggested?   
(Although it would actually be a good way to handle app-specific a11y- 
themed icons, but probably not much else.)

So, how should we really be doing this?

Cheeri,
Calum.

--
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            GNOME Desktop Team
http://blogs.sun.com/calum             +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems