Bug#1143177: desktop-base: duplicate wallpapers in the wallpaper selection menu due to two symlinks pointing to the same wallpaper folder

On Fri, 31 Jul 2026 at 11:27:10 +0000, Q Q wrote:
>When using desktop-base in Debian with modern desktop environments such as KDE
>Plasma 6, the Ceratopsian wallpapers appear twice in the wallpaper selection
>menu.

I think it's misleading to say "modern desktop environments": GNOME 
(gnome-control-center) doesn't seem to have this problem. It might be 
specific to Plasma, or desktop environments that follow a particular 
pattern for enumerating possible wallpapers, or a subset of the 
supported desktop enviroments that includes Plasma but not GNOME.

>The issue is caused by the presence of two separate symlinks inside /usr/share/
>wallpapers/ with different names (ceratopsian and DebianTheme), both of which
>point to the same base wallpaper resource (Ceratopsian). Plasma 6 scans both
>symlinks independently and treats them as different entries

Whichever Plasma component is responsible for listing possible 
wallpapers could equally well address this by deduplicating the themes 
by their realpath(), or by the contents of their metadata.json, or some 
other suitable unique identifier.

Actually, /usr/share/wallpapers/ seems to contain *three* separate 
symlinks to ceratopsian: ceratopsian and ceratopsian_wallpaper point to 
it directly, and DebianTheme points to it via /etc/alternatives. Perhaps 
Plasma is already doing this deduplication, but only for direct 
symlinks, and not for symlink-to-a-symlink?

     smcv