Hi all,
Apologies up front as this is not a “workable” bug report per se, just an overall impression.
I worked with synfig for the first time yesterday, using it for about 10 hours nearly continuously. (On Win 7, sp1.)
During that session, it crashed literally dozens and dozens of times. And only while I tried nailing a few bugs did it crash the same way.
For me, although I love synfig’s potential, using it at all has now become highly questionable. During that session, I did nothing more complex than the graphics and animation version of Hello World: size a canvas, drop a big rectangle over it to create a background color, add just a couple of drag and drop circles (no spline changes, only modest parameter changes, e.g. change color or resize) … then animate one circle across the canvas and back, over 2 seconds. Dirt simple … yet synfig landed nose down in the dirt too often.
I sort of feel bad about posting this, because I’ve been a developer for over 40 years and well understand — and appreciate! — how much work is involved - not to mention doing such work is a labor of love. But my system is stable and synfig is clearly not so.
Today, I’m going to try it out again on a Mac and on a Linux box. But honestly, I’m sceptical.
I posit this to you all: If you really want synfig to catch on, shouldn’t you do more QA ** before letting it out the door? (Yes, I understand there’s probably only a handful of volunteers doing so, making QA difficult. … then again - and it should go without saying - dealing with bugs and complaints usually takes more time.)
(** I found several mistakes that a simple, 5 minute regression test would have caught. 1.0.2 … have posted in bug tracker.)
Thanks for your efforts and for taking time to read this.
You all have a wonderful thing here.
- Howard in Florida
