Building Synfig on Windows (Konstantin's report)

Thank you for testing. Please try also to work with complex files. I think resize bug is more likely to appear on big ( = slow) compositions.

Hi!
The biggest and most complex file I currently have is my switchlayer-template and that worked fine. I also fooled around with some banner animations and that went ok too, and I could even do a realtime playback in the canvas window. Something I was never able to do in the past with any other windows version. Only problem I encountered so far is Cairo giving me some troubles with certain lst.files.
Greetz!

Congratulations!
Tested the install options and works fine.
Resize looks to be fixed in Windows XP 32 bits.
Played a few minutes with pirates.sif and didn’t crashed (single thread disabled). It still crashing randomly in other cases, even a simple file, like usual :mrgreen:
With pirates I did -Cairo and Software, single thread disabled:
Zoom in and immediately start to resize the canvas window. I can see the tiles being rendered meanwhile resizing, everything updated with continuous feedback. I repeated this with different zooms, Cairo, Software and nothing, it didn’t hang. :smiley: :smiley: :smiley:
-G

Cairo has several bugs and limitations in this release. The upcoming 0.64.1 will have many of them fixed. Importing anything but png will fail though.
-G

Great to know! Thank you for testing, Carlos!

Well, maybe it’s ok to officially release 0.64.0 for Windows today, what do you think?

We still have issue #459 not fixed, but it was in Synfig for years before, so I think we can postpone it for further release.

Hi!
No problems at all with pirates.sif on Windows 7. And no random crashes related to single thread disabling so far either (been working since 6.30u this morning with single thread diasbled without one crash. Maybe Murphy is on my side today)
Greetz!

Just a note - I haven’t touched anything related with Single thread mode. So this is just a luck I think. :slight_smile:

I think it is the right moment. That would allow you to focus on other things and we can release 0.64.1 for all platforms.
Fantastic!!!
-G

So, it’s officially here now! - synfig.org/cms/en/news/synfi … available/

BTW, with the last build I also managed to fix the issue #459. Enjoy!

Cogratulations! And for the bug #459 too!
-G

Hi!
Great work and well done! :smiley:
Greetz!

Thank you!

Yes. :slight_smile: I believe Glib::locale_from_utf8() should be used in more places (in load/saving routines, for example), but I have postponed this for later.

My possible further steps in that area:

  • Migrate from MinGW to more modern Mingw-W64 toolchain (within the same cygwin environment). That would allow to try the 64bit build.
  • Also, Mingw-W64 toolchain is used in Fedora, so I can get back to finishing the idea of compiling/debugging Windows version of Synfig in Linux.

Today I have built the latest development version - dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/155 … 130803.exe

Please note: This is a development version, which mean it might be unstable. Use at your own risk.

Note that while you may not have done anything to explicitly ‘fix’ multi-threading, the fact that you’re using a different compiler and not the MSYS environment, may be enough that it now works as it does under Linux. Yes?

When I get a chance I’d like to be able to duplicate your Fedora cross compile setup. My last attempt was woefully deficient.

According to this:
synfig.org/cms/en/news/virus … ows-builds
I think you should remove the above link availability.
-G

Hi, pixelgeek!
The latest successful builds are NOT built on Fedora.
They are built in Windows using the MINGW toolchain. The only difference is that I’m running this toolchain in the Cygwin environment (cygwin.com/). Cygwin gives many advantages:

  • You can install all required (precompiled) components using the setup tool
  • You get all Linux build toolchain in place
  • You can work in the Cygwin environment much like the same as you work in Linux
    The build script is commited in the synfig source tree - github.com/morevnaproject/synfi … w-build.sh
    Notice I have wrote some usage notes at the top of the script.

Done.

[size=150]Important announcement:[/size]
We have received reports that our Windows binaries of Synfig are infected with a virus. While we investigating the issue the binaries are temporarily taken offline. Sorry for inconvenience.

OK, the investigation of the “virus alarm” issue is done, here’s my report.

Step 1. First of all I have tested the synfig installation bundle on the different PC
with the latest version of Avast Free antivirus installed. Result: no threats found.
avast-scan-cropped.png
Then I have installed Synfig and scanned the synfig folder. No alarm.

Step 2. There was one report about the antivirus complaining on libgdk-win32-2.0-0.dll file.
This file is part of CygPort’s mingw-gtk package, version 2.24.12-1.

I wanted to be sure that file is unmodified since the time it was installed.
So I’ve downloaded the original package from here and run an md5sum check for the downloaded version and installed one.

$ md5sum /var/run/media/zelgadis/Windows7_OS/Program\ Files\ (x86)/Synfig/bin/libgdk-win32-2.0-0.dll
c108435ed7f1b1583c108f3e0d0a00f4 /var/run/media/zelgadis/Windows7_OS/Program Files (x86)/Synfig/bin/libgdk-win32-2.0-0.dll

$ md5sum ~/Downloads/mingw-gtk2.0-2.24.12-1/usr/i686-pc-mingw32/sys-root/mingw/bin/libgdk-win32-2.0-0.dll
c108435ed7f1b1583c108f3e0d0a00f4 /home/zelgadis/Downloads/mingw-gtk2.0-2.24.12-1/usr/i686-pc-mingw32/sys-root/mingw/bin/libgdk-win32-2.0-0.dll

Result: the file is unchanged and the same as provided in CygPorts package.

All operations in step 2 were made from my Linux OS, to exclude the possibility of beign affected by (potentially existing) virus.

Step 3. I’ve booted into my build host and run online virus check by ESet.


Result: No threats found.

Step 4. I’ve booted back in Linux and downloaded Kaspersky Rescue Disk iso image.
I have burned the iso image onto CD, booted from it, and launched the virus scan for all hard drives.

Result: No threats found.

Step 5. After all that I booted back into Linux and used online virus scan services to check Synfig binaries.

[size=150]CONCLUSION: After all those tests I can safely classify the virus infection reports as false alarm. I’m putting the Windows binaries are back online.[/size]

Such an incident is another signal to migrate our build toolchain into Fedora’s crosscompile environment. I really don’t like all those “possibilities to have virus”. If we will build Windows binaries on Linux, then the probability of virus infection cases is close to zero.

With the Windows now done will it be possible to see Windows versions of the development snapshots synfig.org/cms/en/download/development

Can I get some info on whether it would be possible for the develpment snapshots of Synfig to have windows versions? synfig.org/cms/en/download/development
That seems like the most important priority right now for Synfig’s growth.

Hello, everyone!

Today I’m happy to present the testing 64-bit build of Synfig: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/15516795/synfigstudio-0.64.0-64bit-20130823.exe

Known issues (in addition to ones in 32-bit version):

  • Document filename damaged when running plugin with unsaved file.
  • Only English locale
  • No native look

The bad news: Recently Cygwin have updated their gcc version to 4.7.3 (see here and here) and that completely broke the mingw cross-compile toolchain on Windows. So, my build scripts doesn’t work on Windows anymore. I still can compile packages on Fedora, but it’s kinda pain to debug the binaries there. So, I’m trying to figure out how to fix the problem and get my scripts working on Windows again. Currently I am using precompiled binaries for all dependent libs (gtk, glib, boost, etc) shipped by cygport and this is the broken part. Probably I will need to recompile all dependencies by myself (which is pain to mainitain) or… or something else, I don’t know yet. Anyway, that’s my real priority at the moment. ^___^