Hi all. Just thought I'd update everyone on the Win32 situation.
Re: win32 startup crashes =================== For the entire summer, I have been without a Win32 box on which to do native builds or test Inkscape. All I can do is make cross-compiled builds and depend on other people to test and debug Win32 factors.
Simarilius and others have been researching many possible reasons for the crashing bugs, and trying to alleviate them. malloc/free and null pointers seem to be prime suspects.
One possibility occurred to me yesterday. The GCC3.4.1 compiler we have been using for cross-compiling was a CVS HEAD version, and not the final 3.4.1 release. It was possible that MinGW patches might insufficiently apply to this code. It is thus possible that the objects created from C++ might be buggy.
So I rebuilt the cross-compiler and all of the C++ libs in our gtk24.zip collection, and put these new builds on the web site. Anyone building Win32 Inkscape should get a fresh copy of these. The same links as before have the new items.
I built Inkscape with these libs yesterday, put them on the server. Bulia said it works; Simarilius says there are still some problems.
So -at least- we are making some progress.
One possible problem area to investigate is MSVCRT's RtlFreeHeap() seeing different address spaces in the .exe and .dlls. Allocating memory in one, and freeing in the other would cause a fault in WinNT and above (not 9x).
Re: server =================== After more than a week of downtime, my little development server is partially back online. The current location is now: http://troi.hous.es3.titan.com/~rjamison/inkscape
By 'partially,' I mean that it can be accessed via http, but the admin has not fixed the routers to allow the machine to see the Net. So it cannot do a cvs checkout, thus cannot do an autobuild. The admin is a good guy, so this condition is certainly temporary.
Because of this, I did a manual build, and put a copy in the /builds subfolder (link at the top of the page). I will do this occasionally until things are fixed. InkscapeLatest.zip points to it.
Bob