On Sun, 18 Jul 2004, Mike Hearn wrote:
Hi guys,
Firstly, some good news. On compiling Inkscape against the GTK 2.2 headers, which is a part of doing an autopackage release of it, my crash mysteriously vanished. So that's an interesting data point.
Secondly, there is an package of 0.39 available here:
Kewl, thanks! I'll add this to the downloads page.
It's built against a new version of autopackage, 0.6, which will be released properly sometime tomorrow. Likewise the nightlies and the GTKmm/sigc++ packages have also been rebuilt against that release.
Good deal.
I checked the server logs the other day, there have been ~1700 downloads
Excellent! What I've heard from people who have used this has been positive. I know from my own experience that it can sometimes fail, but I've not heard any complaints either.
Because of this I'm feeling pretty confident that the 0.6 release is likewise stable and reasonable compatible with a variety of setups - in fact we've fixed a few distro compatibility bugs in this release, especially for Slackware users. So, if you could link to the 0.39 package from the Inkscape website, that'd be great as I feel a lot of people would benefit from a package of the stable release. Hongli has created some stock HTML that people can embed/tweak for their websites which identify the fact that it's an autopackage and link to the instructions for how to install them:
I've added a link to the above to the download page.
Having packaged up Inkscape of course I wanted to play with it - that's where the crash report came from. So I drew an icon/logo for autopackage:
http://autopackage.org/logos/logos.html
Why not marvel at my lack of artistic talent? If any of the pros on this mailing list want to draw us a better one please feel free! :)
*Grin* I love that autopackage was able to use inkscape for that. :-) Befriend Brisgeek; he is the best icon author I know.
Finally, I'm afraid I'm not finished with the patches yet! This:
http://cvs.sunsite.dk/viewcvs.cgi/*checkout*/autopackage/apbuild/relaytool
... is likewise a non-work of art. I was originally going to submit a patch to make gtkspell dlopened at runtime, but realised that this was (a) tedious and (b) going to happen a lot. So I wrote relaytool which is designed to automate it.
Yeah, I ran into the gtkspell issue last time I installed the autopackage, on SuSE 9.1.
You use it like this:
gcc -o testapp testapp.c -lgtkspell
becomes
gcc -o testapp testapp.c `relaytool --relay gtkspell -lgtkspell`
We can use a similar technique to allow Inkscape to use the GTK 2.4 file picker but cleanly fall back to the GTK 2.2/2.0 APIs when GTK 2.4 isn't present.
Sounds like something worth looking at. Note though that long term we intend to implement a more sophistictated plugin extension system, with the intent of providing a systematic way of handling things like gtkspell. So hopefully we won't need this...
By the way, Mike, one request we have for autopackage, that we'd like to see implemented by the time we release 0.40 is a way for us to hook to the autopackage files without having to include them in our source trie. In other words, we'd like to be able to link to a libautopackage that includes prefix.cpp and such, rather than have prefix.cpp inside our codebase. I think this would benefit us by making it a little more straightforward to coordinate changes between our projects. What do you think?
Bryce