Tuesday 13 October 2020

Inkscape's f**k up?

No, it's its bad interaction with "qlipper".


I'm a big fan of Inkscape; I had to become one because my job (let's be more precise: its voluntary, a.k.a. not-paid-for part) included some fooling with vector graphics stuff. Mainly correcting other people's f**-ups*. I enjoyed it much more than Xfig almost 20 years ago. Inkscape did a great job for me; it did crash from time to time, but I didn't mind—instead I pressed Ctrl-S more frequently. I learned a lot (still being a newbie, since there was really no need to go any further). I could work, help people out and save a lot of time this way.

And then Inskscape 1.0.x showed up in my beloved lubuntu 20.04 (it's a difficult kind of love, doesn't work out-of-the-box.) Try cutting a path out of you image—you get some message pop-up thing, and Inkscape immediately switches from your document to "Memory document 1". Nice for a 1.0-something version...

Recalling that 18.04 probably had some older version (0.92.x, according to some rumours), I tried removing the package and followed the instructions (apparently valid for version 18.04 only, "tl;dr") and tried to return to that. The installer did its job, but then I discovered there was this 1.0.x version back again. Sh*t... And I have no time or abilities or mental capacity or patience to dig in apt & friends to check why... Trying to build the older version failed miserably, even after running their "install_dependencies" script in the "full" mode. At this stage I stopped for a while and made a donation of $20 after seeing their red-heart shaped icon and PayPal link; which was somewhat soothing for my nerves. As RMS put it, approx.: "...and people will push the button and pay that dollar, because it feels good." Although he mentioned media/music rather than software.

Five minutes more of digging for other people's experiences and asking myself "why the hell am I struggling alone here?". Then some enlightenment showed up on some Suse forum, back from 2009 or so—that it is possibly a bug related to the environment Inkscape is running in, and likely related to some clipboard "helpers". Oh yes, I know what to do. "killall -9 qlipper" did it for me! Which was surprising in itself that I knew of qlipper. Pleasure to kill, as that fine German band Kreator put it. And prevent the thing from running at openbox's startup, perhaps delete it as a package—who needs this kind of garbage anyway? I don't. Now I can pretend I know what's going on in my machine again ("It's all about control" as Gentoo people used to say). 

Or should I back up until I make that toy example of a Qt app compile and run at last. No, it's not my toy example, it's the one provided with Qt-Creator + Designer. My very first steps at low-quality gui design in the non-Windows world. Since I offered someone some help with a simple data-analysis software (requires a substantial rewrite from Delphi to something newer), the obvious step is to have some user-friendly gooey frontend for plotting data. And I think gnuplot is an obvious candidate for that, but its user-friendliness is debatable. I alwasys get away with learning, knowing and using some stuff & tricks in gnuplot on a lousiest level: the need-to-know-then-forget basis. It's just not worth remembering to me. So perhaps when I try to write the window for "designing graph style", I will learn something for good. And for the bad.


*Whether they f**cked up as it's usually doneworking hard with good will, or avoiding the work whenever possible... (The second approach was no problem for the "boss", so it seems. Everyone was paid—some for work, others for "work", or showing up at work from time to time).

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