Where place own application icons? How to get the current theme icons?

Question

I'm developing a little application for Gnome, Unity and KDE desktops. I want the application icons to be fully theme aware.

Now, I'm including the icons on the application directory on /usr/lib/my-application/ as SVG, and I'm loading them with the full path. I suppose this is fine as the start point, but I want to integrate them on the system better.

My motivation: I don't want to break the Humanity and Humanity-Dark themes --very worried about the Indicator panel looks. How do I provide Humanity and Humanity-dark icons? How do I know the current theme? Should I ask for it?

I'm using mostly bash and python.

Answer 1

The icons are in /usr/share/icons, but the correct way of getting them depends of what libraries are you using, if is PyQt there is a method to get the icon from the current theme.

Check this: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12805036/qicon-fromtheme-not-displaying-icon-in-pyqt

If you're using gtk I suppose there is an alternative, this is what Google says:

http://www.pygtk.org/docs/pygtk/class-gtkicontheme.html