On Wed, 8 Dec 2004, Carsten Niehaus wrote:
The reasons are that Inkscape is "known" to crash an startup for some people (see e.g. [2]).
A backtrace from gdb (not an strace trace) would be required to diagnose this one. It's either the result of a double free or something attempting to use an uninitialized pointer.
NPTL should not make a difference.
I am using 0.39 since it it released with the ebuild Gentoo provides as "unstable" and had _no_ problems at all. For Inkscape 0.40 there is the problems of new deps, esp. libboehm and gtmmm. See [3] for it.
Our use of the boehm collector should no longer require C++ support to be enabled... (at least as of 0.40 -- we have our own C++ support layer now)
As for gtkmm, version 2.4 or later is absolutely required.
Furthermore there have been a lot reports about GLIB-crashes I never could reproduce. See [4] for a glib-crash in 0.40.
Hmm. I did not think we were using threads at all; most of Inkscape is not currently threadsafe, so thread use has been forbidden to developers.
[ could someone please grep to verify that we aren't using any glib thread functions? ]
Perhaps for some people a library used for printing (gnome-print or something?) has been built in such a way that it requires a threaded application?
I hope that some of you could add comments to these 4 bugreports to help the gentoo-ebuild-writer. Gentoo is probably the only distro without a uptodate Inkscape and that is a shame. If you don't want to do it yourself write me a mail and I will add the comments.
Hope these comments are helpful.
-mental