I decided to give Tropy another try after a few years away, and I find that I cannot import any images without the software crashing.
I am running on Debian (Testing, fully updated), and I have tried both the binary distribution (1.16.2) and building from the GitHub source; the behaviour is the same in both cases.
When I import any image (either via the file import dialog or drag & drop), the software instantly crashes. It doesn’t seem to matter what file format (I’ve tried JPEGs, PNGs, and PDFs) or whether I try to import files singly or in groups.
I’m attaching a log, though it doesn’t seem to be very informative.
tropy.log (4.3 KB)
(BTW, I’ve looked at other similar crash-on-import posts here, and none seems to be quite the same as what I’m seeing.)
The bundled image libraries are causing this crash, presumably because some of the system libraries they are linked against are of a different version on your system. For Linux, the best way to install Tropy is via Flatpak if there is no compiled version for a specific distribution.
Wouldn’t building from source avoid this problem? (I’ve got no experience with Node.js or npm but for normal software, building from source links to the actually installed library so it’s not a problem unless the API has changed…)
It does seem to work when installing via flatpak though.
There’s a weird error on start where it seems to be trying to load a nonexistent project database, but AFAICT this isn’t affecting the functioning of the software once I load my project.
Yes, absolutely, building from source also works. The main issue is libvips and all its dependencies. We ship a pre-compiled version of it, but when you build from source you can also link against the system’s libvips.
When you check the logs, does it say which project it tries to open?
Yeah, it’s trying to open $PWD/project.tpy—that is, it’s trying to open file project.tpy in whatever directory I’m in when I run Tropy.
On the build question, I’m not sure why I was getting the same error when I built from source—that frankly perplexed me, as it should link to the correct libvidps then?
Ah, that’s an issue we’ve seen before! For some reason the flatpak is started with the home directory as an argument (since that’s a folder, Tropy assumes its a standard project and tries to open it). Are you using X11 or Wayland?
When building from source you need to pass --global-libvips to the rebuild script if you want to link against the system libvips.
That’s such a weird flatpak bug! And yeah, I’m still running X11 (xfce).
I’ll try rebuilding with when I get a chance --global-libvidps but for now the flatpack version is working (despite the ghost argument glitch).
