Synfig

High-Quality 2D Vector Animation

synfig status

Tuesday, February 13, 2007 by pabs
Posted in

Page moved to the wiki: News/2007-02-13

I'm back from sailing the high seas and into the thick of synfig stuff.

While I was away:

  • lots of patches were sent in
  • some patches were applied to svn
  • a new unofficial Win32 build was created
  • questions were asked on irc

Stuff achieved for the next release:

  • We have a Win32 build maintainer, for at least a year (welcome Atrus)!
  • g++ no longer seems to miscompile synfig and if it does there is a simple workaround
  • the OOM condition when building synfigstudio on non-i386 platforms may not occur, this needs testing
  • Lots of crashers and other bugs fixed
  • A couple of small features added
  • Some parts of the UI were reworked

Things that still need to be fixed for the release:

  • We need a MacOS build maintainer and a good MacOS build (preferably a universal build).

Things that we probably should fix, not sure if they are release blockers or not, please provide feedback about this:

  • The synfigstudio gif, dv, ffmpeg and imagemagick targets still crash. synfig ones are fine though.

Stuff that would be nice, but isn't essential:

  • Move away from the bootstrap scripts to autoreconf
  • Make synfig and synfigstudio relocatable (ala portableapps.com)
  • Fix all the bugs and add all the feature requests
  • Achieve world peace :)

10 Comments for “synfig status”

  1. atrus* Says:
    Wednesday, February 14, 2007

    The synfigstudio gif <...> targets still crash.

    Where? In Linux? Because when I'm typing “C:\Program File\Synfig\bin\synfig.exe” -t gif -o zt.gif “C:\Program File\Synfig\bin\examples\zdepthtest.sif” I have my animated gif...

  2. pabs* Says:
    Wednesday, February 14, 2007

    synfigstudio, not synfig, from the File -> Render menu item. Yes, on Linux, dunno about Windows though.

  3. Krischan Says:
    Friday, February 16, 2007

    Sweet! Definitly looking forward to try out the new version. So far there have been always some show stoppers that made it impossible to try Synfig out (for me at least). Please make sure that there is a working version of the newest Synfig in the Ubuntu Feisty Fawn Release by the time of feature freeze, since that will really help out stupid guys like me ;)

  4. pabs* Says:
    Friday, February 16, 2007

    The Ubuntu version of synfig does not have a maintainer, like most of the software in Ubuntu they just take the Debian package and recompile it.

    You can be sure that Debian will have the latest version as soon as it is released. You will need to ask on the Ubuntu IRC channels for someone to sync it to Ubuntu, since it is a manual process at the moment IIRC.

  5. Madsen Says:
    Sunday, February 18, 2007

    OMG OMG OMG!!! I was so afraid that synfig had gone belly-up. Unfortunately I just bought a MacBook 2 weeks ago only to realize that the OS X-build had been pulled (I just apt-get install'ed it earlier on my Debian box, so I never really visited the downloads section.)

    I really hope you find a maintainer for OS X-builds, because I fell so deeply in love with Synfig in the 2 weeks I could use it. I tried Flash 8 Pro, but found that Synfig was much more to my liking. I wouldn't mind maintaining it myself, but I can't, since I've only used OS X for two weeks and really don't know much about C/C++ (except for Hello World) and the whole build process.

    Hooray again! I'm really looking forward to the next release!

  6. pabs* Says:
    Monday, February 19, 2007

    Madsen: if you can, please come onto IRC and we can discuss how to build it on OSX. Also, see the build instructions:

    http://wiki.synfig.com/Build_instructions

  7. TheCaptain Says:
    Thursday, March 1, 2007

    As far as I can tell most of what is needed to run this program is no longer available. I get a 404 error on all files on this server and on some essential file... I think? I've never done anything like this before. I don't get why open source programs usually come un-compiled...

  8. pabs* Says:
    Thursday, March 1, 2007

    Which files are you trying to download? Some of the links were broken due to unofficial packages moving around and stuff. Fixed the ones I could, deleted the fedora links and added some SUSE ones I found. Thanks for letting us know that there were broken links. Come join us on IRC!

    The whole point of free software is the source code. Free software developers deal with the creating the source and generally leave binary packages to the distributions, apart from Windows and OSX binaries, usually non-free platforms are a secondary concern to creating the software though.

  9. Pia Says:
    Sunday, June 10, 2007

    Hi pabs, great work! I didn't know you were doing this :)

    The rendering crashing in synfigstudio is not a complete blocker to release, and I'm glad it is out regardless, however it is a real problem in terms of using it as a demo or teaching tool. I'm helping students and the education sector in Australia generally to use more and more FLOSS so I hope this issue can be sorted soon.

    If I had the tech skills I'd help myself, meanwhile I'll happily test and report issues.

  10. pabs* Says:
    Monday, June 11, 2007

    Hey Pia :)

    That particular bug is fixed (and a whole heap more) - check out the newer news items.

    I'm hoping to get a new release out during debconf/debcamp. Gotta add the new tango-styled icons first and then validate everything.