- Various Windows issues. I'll let someone else comment on whether any of these should hold up the release.
Do you have bug tracker links?
Easiest is to view bug tracker (http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=93438&atid=604306) by descending Priority.
I have a patch in my local tree to switch from using the pango-ft2 backend to pango-win32 which should fix a large number of win32 bugs (1329863,1323437,1296310,1287763,1309726,1226656,1188530,1173133 and 1097049, I think. The same problem keeps getting reported in different ways because there are lots of places which use text). It's medium-sized (4 files) and cannot be rated as safe.
For those of you on Linux, the fundamental issue here is that Windows users do not, in general, have fontconfig caches ready-built, so the first time they use Inkscape it will do a scan of all fonts in the system. If you have any two of the three [slow processor,many fonts,on-access virus scanner] then this can take a significant amount of time (we're talking minutes). The problem is compounded by several issues:
- There is no feedback whatsoever as to what is going on. Not even an hourglass.
- There's a bug in the current fontconfig which will cause the cache to be written incorrectly if you have fonts in subdirectories, meaning that Inkscape will re-scan every time.
- The scan is done the first time Inkscape needs to render some text, which is all over the place: pressing the first key in the text tool, opening the text and font dialog, viewing one of the tutorials, or even using File|Open (there's text in the 'no preview' image).
Given all this, we would appear to have a few options:
1) What I was planning to do was let 0.43 go out still containing the problem. It's been in there for loads of releases already, what's one more?
2) Throw my patch in to the branch and hope it doesn't break anything. Yeah, right.
3) Put my patch in the branch and delay release for yet another week or so to get it tested.
4) Release Linux and MacOS now, put my patch in the branch, and test for another week before releasing Win32.
5) Create a 0.43.1 for it.
I realise this isn't the best time to be talking about this, but I only got round to fixing it yesterday.
Richard.