Cool VL Viewer forum

Henri, by any chance...

Can I download the sources for Cool VL Viewer 1.26.4.22 and 1.26.4.23 somewhere?

No, I don't keep deprecated binaries around, sorry.

Umh... Henri??

I asked for sources, not binaries.

I have the installers with the binaries myself.

A diff between .22 and .23 could do too, if that is easier for you.

Sources or binaries, it's all the same.

The diffs from one release to the next are available here, as always...

Thanks, didn't know you had them up there

I've been poking around a bit with other TPV's as well today and there is a clear correlation with any viewer having something V3-ish in it.
From some of the most used TPV's f.ex. Firestorm and Catznip shows this issue while Phoenix and Singularity doesn't.

I therefore right now seriously suspect that the underlying issue is caused upstream, in some code or shared library that is reused.

Hello Jessica, hi Henri et al.,

I think there definitely is something going on with regard to Jessica's observations. I had pointed out similar things in http://sldev.free.fr/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=862, and then they suddenly disappeared. Well, they've been back again for some time now, the same crashes tracing back to libcairo, with the same odd intermittancy. I just haven't brought it back up since I have no new leads on the issue.

I would presume it takes as little as a pointer somewhere running amok in the rendering engine depending on viewer settings, smashing memory somewhere that gets used when libcairo tries to perform a specific function. Add to the mix that memory layouts may be different depending on the system environment, and you have all the makings for a veritable heisenbug.

In those circumstances it's obvious Henri can't do anything about it, and since he's clearly stated more than once that speculating about things like that is not something he likes to see on his forum, I'll leave it at that unless/until I stumble across a reliable way to reproduce the issue.

Henri, have you ever considered that when reporting bugs, asking people to include their settings XML file might help shed some light on odd issues?

Love,
Lia

Good try, Jessica
I agree in toto, Amalia.
Too bizarre crashes for a stable branch, Henri.

For the record Henri, the crashes are not tied to the case of "the missing icons".

Both you and I were right actually. I tracked the missing icon case down to the version of libpng that is pulled into the viewer.
Between .22 and .23 libpng was switched from 1.2 to 1.5 according to the diff, and obviously libpng 1.5 won't work on systems with 1.2 installed.
I know your distro uses 1.5 but there are still many others around using 1.2 you know...

I compiled a viewer with libpng1.2 today and can confirm that the icons in the dialogues are now back as normal.
It does not however cure the intermittent crashing (fyi I did not enable tcmalloc this time, just switched libpng to the older version), and I'm 100% with Amalia on this.
Something is definitively going on.

My distro also uses v1.2. Your issue is a clear sign that something is wrong on your system (are you using a 64bits system ?... many issues exist on such systems with conflicting 32/64bits PNG (and other) libraries).
FYI, the viewer uses a statically linked 32bits v1.5 libpng library for its own needs and the dynamic PNG library that is loaded on your system when running the viewer is just the result of your GTK+ system libraries needing it (it's also the case for libxml2 by the way).

AGAIN, there is NOTHING wrong with the viewer itself. It's a distro issue !!!

After a couple of hours on Sl and 3 images uploaded from Bondage Ranch sim, 2 images from London City (85 avatars) on an almost 5 years old notebook and open-source graphics drivers, CoolVLViewer-1.26.4.37-Linux seems solid to me...