Re: [Inkscape-devel] Rejuvenate Sodipodi as 'Inkscape Lite'
Bryce, Thanks very much for taking the time to give such a detailed reply.
To explain a little bit more about the situation. The official 'standard' Puppy Linux liveCD is intended to run on older PCs and to load totally into RAM. Hence my interest in a smaller Inkscape. However, Puppy is highly customisable, and various 'chubby' versions of Puppy get released. It is very easy to remaster the CD -- just download any extra packages, run the remaster-cd script, and a new squashfs file is created and burnt to CD -- and it will still all load into RAM if you have say 256M or more, or have a swap partition.
So, we will still offer the latest Inkscape. But, I would like the "lite" version in the 'standard' liveCD.
I downloaded 0.36 and it compiled ok. Note, I used '--without-gnome-print' -- Puppy does have libgnomeprint, libgnomecanvas, and libgnomeprintui, as required for Abiword and Gnumeric, but Inkscape seems to need more than that.
Okay, Inkscape 0.36 runs, but when I choose File -> Print... from the menu, up pops a msg: "Inkscape encountered an internal error and will close now." On the commandline there is this error msg: "(inkscape:31765): CRITICAL **: sp_module_db_register: assertion 'module->id != NULL' failed"
Note, in Sodipodi it does work ok. It was also compiled with '--without-gnome-print'.
I'm prepared to have a go at fixing this, but I was wondering if that error message means anything to you, and if you can give me a clue where to look.
I'm proposing to call this (assuming I fix the printing!) "InkscapeLite" and the executable "inkscapelite" and arrange so there is no clash if the full Inkscape package is installed later by a Puppy user.
regards, Barry Kauler
On Wed, Aug 23, 2006 at 10:52:08AM +1000, Void wrote: > You guys are going to laugh at this suggestion > ...but I thought that I would ask anyway. > > Up until recently we had Sodipodi in Puppy, but > many people complained they did not like the user > interface (although I personally find it okay). > So, I went over to Inkscape, but that uses Gtkmm > and the binary package is about FIVE TIMES > BIGGER than Sodipodi.
Note that Gtkmm itself is not the cause of this size increase. There are a number of libraries that have been added to Inkscape to enable so many of the features it's gained over the years. Gtkmm is just one of these additions.
The real cause is probably the fact that we shifted from C to C++. Compiled C++ code is well known to require more disk space and memory. Inkscape doubled in size overnight when we shifted from C-based compilation to C++-based compilation. Gtkmm and other libs are in C++ so they're in the same situation.
> What I would really like is to go back to > Sodipodi. I will then be able to dump the Gtkmm > library (about 4M uncompressed) and Inkscape > (about 6M uncompressed). Sodipodi is only about > 2M. To satisfy the critics and to greatly > rejuvinate the Sodipodi project, redesigning the > menu to a "conventional" one would be truly > fantastic. > > Is this suggestion totally outrageous? Any
Yes, it does seem illogical... If your goal is simply to have a lighter weight drawing tool, then why not just use an older version of Inkscape? Version 0.35 is basically the same as Sodipodi 0.34, except with a lot of code cleanup and bug fixes. Inkscape 0.36 would probably be a better choice - it's still from before we fully moved to C++ (I think it's the only version of Sodipodi or Inkscape that compiles perfectly using either a C or C++ compiler), and the rpm is actually smaller than the sodipodi 0.34 rpm (867 kb for Inkscape vs. 1.15M for Sodipodi). Plus, Inkscape 0.36 is when we switched from the CSDI interface to the current SDI one, so since your users are asking for the SDI type interface, it would be logical to start from this, instead of having to reinvent all that work yourself. Plus, you'd be more likely to get some support from Inkscape developers if you run into bugs or wish to backport things, than if you were developing from something derived directly from Sodipodi.
Look at http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/PastMilestones to see what things were done in the early days of Inkscape. You should also review the release notes for these early versions to see what features you'd gain or lose for selecting different versions.
E.g. http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/ReleaseNotes035 http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/ReleaseNotes036
Bryce
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On Wed, 23 Aug 2006, Void wrote:
Date: Wed, 23 Aug 2006 21:41:32 +1000 From: Void <void@...1436...> To: inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Inkscape-devel] Rejuvenate Sodipodi as 'Inkscape Lite'
Bryce, Thanks very much for taking the time to give such a detailed reply.
To explain a little bit more about the situation. The official 'standard' Puppy Linux liveCD is intended to run on older PCs and to load totally into RAM. Hence my interest in a smaller Inkscape.
You may also be interested in this http://michaels770.blogspot.com/ since he ported Sodipodi to the 770 due to similar size requirements http://michaels770.blogspot.com/2006/04/sodipodi-graphics-editor-svg.html
I downloaded 0.36 and it compiled ok. Note, I used '--without-gnome-print' -- Puppy does have libgnomeprint, libgnomecanvas, and libgnomeprintui, as required for Abiword and Gnumeric, but Inkscape seems to need more than that.
I've heard far too many complaints about this "requirement" for gnome print. Technically Abiword can be built without those requirements but not if you care about high quality printing. For a long time Abiword used a built in postscript subsystem but the quality and more importantly reliability compared to gnomeprint was not great. Perhaps it wasn't your intention to sound like you were blaming Abiword but I want to make sure you understand the reasons gnome print is required.
Also so you know I do not think anyone has extensively tested --gnome-print with inkscape and it is has been there since sodipodi. (I'm surprised no one tested it more since it could have been a good way to generate PDF.)
I'm proposing to call this (assuming I fix the printing!) "InkscapeLite" and the executable "inkscapelite" and arrange so there is no clash if the full Inkscape package is installed later by a Puppy user.
On Wed, 23 Aug 2006, Alan Horkan wrote:
Also so you know I do not think anyone has extensively tested --gnome-print with inkscape and it is has been there since sodipodi. (I'm surprised no one tested it more since it could have been a good way to generate PDF.)
Kees looked into it and found our use of gnome-print was a little too postscript focused.
--Ted
On Wed, 23 Aug 2006, Ted Gould wrote:
Date: Wed, 23 Aug 2006 12:24:14 -0500 (EST) From: Ted Gould <ted@...11...> To: Alan Horkan <horkana@...44...> Cc: Inkscape is a vector graphics editor inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Inkscape-devel] Rejuvenate Sodipodi as 'Inkscape Lite'
On Wed, 23 Aug 2006, Alan Horkan wrote:
Also so you know I do not think anyone has extensively tested --gnome-print with inkscape and it is has been there since sodipodi. (I'm surprised no one tested it more since it could have been a good way to generate PDF.)
Kees looked into it and found our use of gnome-print was a little too postscript focused.
Okay sorry, I had not realised thanks for the information.
On Wed, 23 Aug 2006, Void wrote:
So, we will still offer the latest Inkscape. But, I would like the "lite" version in the 'standard' liveCD.
If Inkscape is the only application that is using GTKmm, you might try linking it statically into Inkscape, and then stripping the result. C++ symbols are large, and I'm guessing that is a large part of the GTKmm binary size.
I downloaded 0.36 and it compiled ok. Note, I used '--without-gnome-print' -- Puppy does have libgnomeprint, libgnomecanvas, and libgnomeprintui, as required for Abiword and Gnumeric, but Inkscape seems to need more than that.
Hmm, I didn't think it needed more than that... but I haven't played with that code for a while. This may be a 'false' dependency in that a header is required but not really used.
Okay, Inkscape 0.36 runs, but when I choose File -> Print... from the menu, up pops a msg: "Inkscape encountered an internal error and will close now." On the commandline there is this error msg: "(inkscape:31765): CRITICAL **: sp_module_db_register: assertion 'module->id != NULL' failed"
Well, this would be in the module creation code. Typically (I say that because the code has changed alot since then) what happens is that a module gets created and then gets added into the module database. It looks like the database is saying that the module object wasn't properly formed. In "0.36 terms" module is what we call extensions today.
--Ted
participants (3)
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Alan Horkan -
Ted Gould -
Void