Packaging

[Mike Hearn]

On Thu, 16 Jun 2005 23:34:12 +0200, Leslie Viljoen wrote:
> I made a .desktop file and an icon for sopwith, what next? Does that help?

Why not submit them upstream rather than apply them as an Ubuntu specific
patch?

Also, FWIW the best way to do this is to get somebody to draw an SVG icon,
then use the make-icons script. This will pre-render the SVG to various
sizes and output to various directories, then print an automake fragment
to stdout that you can copy/paste into a Makefile.am:

http://cvs.sunsite.dk/viewcvs.cgi/autopackage/apbuild/make-icons?rev=1.1

The pre-rendered icons can sometimes look bad at small sizes, particularly
if they have perspective. In that case you need the original icon artist
to redraw them in the GIMP pixel by pixel to make them sharper again, etc.

For people doing this work generally, there are some great artists hanging
out at deviantart.com if like me you suck at drawing :) For instance AJ
Ashton kindly drew an icon for Stellarium, which together with a .desktop
file I recently submitted upstream. In this case his icon was simple and
flat enough that it looked good even at small sizes so no redrawing was
necessary.

thanks -mike