Wubble

Well, if I haven’t had enough fun trying to keep us backward compatible to the stone-age, I now get to worry about forward compatibility too! We got a bug report from a Workstation 5.5 beta user that the snapshot manager crashed when he tried to open it, and he was using Ubuntu Breezy.

I happened to encounter the same problem at home where I’m running Slackware 10.2 and Freerock GNOME 2.12, so was able to debug it and find out that librsvg 2.12.x was the culprit. I was travelling last week so I couldn’t check the source properly until today, but it’s a tiny little problem with rather unfortunate consequences if you use a Gaussian Blur element.

I’ve filed a bug and attached a patch, so you can see the specifics there. I won’t make any smart alec remarks about test suites, but I have attached an example svg to the bug which can hopefully be of benefit in the future.

Hopefully, there won’t be any distro releases between now and the next librsvg release with the fix; we don’t want to save this one for posterity. I currently don’t intend to implement any sort of workaround in our artwork (removing the gaussian blur) because I don’t want to set a precedent for accounting for every minor release of every library, and because I expect to see patches for distros in the unlucky event that a release goes out with this bug.