When you look at a list of applications in USC, it needs to be able to show the icons (and the human-readable application names, and categories and keywords) for all of them, regardless of whether they are installed. You may be looking at hundreds or even thousands of packages at once, and that list may change in a fraction of a second as you change the search text. So if I understand your suggestion correctly, this bug report is not valid, because downloading and unzipping all of those packages on-the-fly to look at the icons inside would be far too slow.
That's why app-install-data exists. It contains extracted and cached *copies* of, not supplements for, the application icons in all packages regardless of whether they are installed, so USC can display them quickly. You are correct, though, that the existence of app-install-data is evidence of a problem. The problem is that because app-install-data is a package like any other, it needs to be updated and uploaded manually, making it unreliable. For example, you mention seeing an application's icon show up in USC only after the application is installed. That seldom happens, but when it does, it's usually because app-install-data is out of date. Similarly, you describe the old icon being shown for an update with a new icon; if that happens, it's because the update to the app- install-data package isn't installed before the update to the application itself. The solution is for individual archives to automatically update an index of icons, human-readable names, and categories on each upload, in the same way that they update Packages.gz with its index of package names, dependencies, and descriptions. The task of fixing that for Ubuntu archives and PPAs is described at <https://dev.launchpad.net/ArchiveIndex>. If you have the time and skill to help out with that, that would be awesome. <https://dev.launchpad.net/> Meanwhile, if you've seen a particular case of an icon showing up only after the application is installed, or being different before and after, please report that at <https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/app-install-data-ubuntu> (or use the command "ubuntu-bug app-install-data"). Finally, you suggest it would help if application developers and packagers could easily learn how the icon caching system works. For pointers on reporting a bug about that (or improving it yourself), see <http://daniel.holba.ch/blog/?p=881>. Thanks! ** Changed in: software-center (Ubuntu) Status: New => Invalid -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/795851 Title: software-center doesn't look inside packages for icons To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/software-center/+bug/795851/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
