deskbar-applet cannot load icons which is shipped with deskbar-applet. I check the defs.py and found DATADIR='' but not /usr/share. The reason is below. in configure.ac of deskbar-applet 2.16.0, there is AS_AC_EXPAND(DATADIR, $datarootdir) , which is expected as /usr/share commonly. however, datarootdir is nowhere. --datadir= option set $datadir, not $datarootdir. so this must be AS_AC_EXPAND(DATADIR)
I found that my autoconf is 2.59, but deskbar-applet's developer used autoconf-2.60. --datarootdir option is appeared at 2.60, so this bug doesn't reproduced at autoconf-2.60. so, if you need to re-autoconf this package, must add depent to >=sys-devel/autoconf-2.60
Fixed, thanks.
*** Bug 146635 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***