One of my favorite open source applications is Inkscape, but if I want to run the latest cutting edge version on my Mac, I'm going to have to upgrade to Leopard or spend hours on the iffy proposition of compiling it from source myself.
Why is it now so difficult to run Inkscape on Tiger? Did someone at Inkscape make an executive decision to make it Leopard-only from now on? Well, sort of. See, there's really only one guy who compiles a Mac binary from the source tree and he upgraded to Leopard. Yup, that's the issue. The guy who compiles the Mac version upgraded his personal system.
Because of some incompatibilities between the newer X11 version in Leopard and the older X11 version in Tiger (and the fact that Apple's not offering an update to X11 for Tiger users), a copy of Inkscape compiled on Leopard won't run on Tiger.
That's why the December 8th build and all builds going forward will be Leopard only... until someone who has a Tiger-based system, the time, and the inclination to do the compiling, and the knowledge of how to package it up offers up a Tiger-compatible binary.
For all of its status as the premiere vector drawing application in the FOSS world, being able to support the XX% of Mac users who haven't upgraded to Leopard is dependent on finding a volunteer with a machine still running Tiger along with the time, energy, and knowledge to compile a distributable binary from source.
And why is this the case? Because it's free and they're dependent on goodwill, donations, and volunteer efforts to get "product" out the door. They don't have a full-time "Mac Guy" on salary with a small lab of company-owned PowerPC and Intel Macs running various OSX versions, so they can have versions of Inkscape available for the widest gamut of Mac users possible.
They've got one guy who volunteers his time and machinery to compile the Mac binary, and he upgraded to Leopard. Thus Inkscape's gone Leopard-only... for now.
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I love Inkscape too. Sorry to hear about your situation, but couldn't you contact that one guy and ask him what he did? I'm sure he'd be happy to give you a step by step procedure on what to do. I'd be happy to do this but, worse luck for me, I've got Windows!
Rygle
Rygle,
He pointed me to a step-by-step for compiling Inkscape on OS X. After I'd been compiling various ports on and off for most of the day to handle the dependencies (took so long because the process threw some errors that had to be rectified) and finally got to compiling Inkscape, the second or third time it threw an error and barfed, I gave up.
I'm hoping that this dearth of Mac compilers is limited to the periodic development builds and not the major releases. But, if worse comes to worse, I'll run it in Windows via Parallels.
- Greg
I'm sure someone will have a Mac running Tiger to build the final version.
I've been caught in the same trap as you, a Tiger user, and I also like using the development version of Inkscape. I tried following the instructions to compile Inkscape from source and after a week of trying and a couple of emails to the maintainer I've given up.
Of course that doesn't mean I'm not using the latest version, I went out and bought Leopard, just make sure you update to the latest version of x11 from the xquartz site otherwise Inkscape won't start.
[...] of you may recall me griping about how you could only get the latest version of Inkscape compile for Mac OS/X 10.5 Leopar.... But because these were just development releases and relied on one motivated developer to compile [...]