Hi, this is probably a stupid newbie question, but when using the "for i in *.svg; do inkscape --vacuum-defs $i; done" command, I get the following error for a lot of files:

** (inkscape:XXXX): CRITICAL **: void Inkscape::GC::Anchored::release() const: assertion `_anchor' failed

I develop an icon set for GNOME, and I wanted to reduce the filesize by batch-applying vacuum defs, but I don't want to risk the above mentioned error damaging any of the files. Therefore, I'd like to know what the error means or if it's safe to ignore it.

I'm running inkscape 0.4.6 in Ubuntu 8.04. Thanks in advance!

According to bug 238511, Vacuum Defs on the command line isn't safe. I've just tested this, and it's true, so I would avoid using --vacuum-defs. This bug doesn't produce any error message (the error message you're seeing is probably bug 236816, which is unrelated).

But it's safe to use from the File menu, right?

brynn wrote:But it's safe to use from the File menu, right?

It appears to be. If you don't trust it, you could save under a different filename after doing Vacuum Defs, and check that the new file still looks the same before continuing.

I haven't had any problems with it under Vista. I was playing around with on colors and ended up adding a few hundred gradients in a file. I did not notice it until I'd edit the rest of the image a lot. After I set what I wanted back to one gradient, Vacuum got the unused ones out. I edited the file for another week with out any problems.

sas wrote:According to bug 238511, Vacuum Defs on the command line isn't safe. I've just tested this, and it's true, so I would avoid using --vacuum-defs. This bug doesn't produce any error message (the error message you're seeing is probably bug 236816, which is unrelated).

Thanks for the info. This answers my question, I'll probably follow up on those bugs and wait until they are resolved. Again, thanks.