Inkscape won't start on Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard

[avs]

Inkscape Inkscape-21714-10.5-i386 won't start on Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.

(0.46 fails too - that seems to be a known bug, but I report that for completeness' sake.
Incompatible library version: DictionaryServices requires version 10.0.0 or later, but libxml2.2.dylib provides version 9.0.0)

The actual issue is that the newest snapshot available as a .dmg hangs upon startup, consuming all CPU. Inkscape has always been slow to start with 600+ fonts on the first startup, but now it has taken more than 30 minutes.

I am trying to start the one packaged in http://inkscape.modevia.com/macosx-snap/Inkscape-21714-10.5-i386.dmg

I took a sample of the process with Activity Monitor and this is where it seems to be spending its eternity:

Total number in stack (recursive counted multiple, when >=5):
        16 gtk_size_group_get_widgets
        10 g_closure_invoke
        10 g_signal_emit_valist
        10 g_signal_init
        8 g_signal_emit_by_name
        6 FcFontList

Sort by top of stack, same collapsed (when >= 5):
        FcStrListCreate 2428
        kevent 2428
        semaphore_wait_signal_trap 2428

[su_v (suv-lp)]

related bug reports:
- bug #392693 "Conflict between bundled and system libxml dylib" and its duplicates

Regarding the above reported error message with an (older) devel snapshot from 2009-07-01 you could check:
a) does the folder '~/.fontconfig' exist? else open terminal.app and type 'mkdir ~/.fontconfig'
b) quit Inkscape & X11, clear the fontcache with 'rm ~/.fontconfig/*', restart Inkscape
c) do you have Macports installed on your computer? see bug #400165 “Binary Inkscape dist crashes when MacPorts is installed”

I would recommend you to try a more recent prerelease build from <http://sourceforge.net/projects/inkscape/files/inkscape/0.47pre1/> (Inkscape0.47-pre1-2 Leopard) or <http://sourceforge.net/projects/inkscape/files/inkscape/0.47pre2/> (coming soon).

[avs (avs)]

Removal of /opt/local/var/cache/fontconfig/* and ~/.fontconfig/* worked. A similar startup problem affected Wireshark, which was resolved as well with these.

Thanks.

[su_v (suv-lp)]

There's a related thread on the X11-users mailing list that describes the same issue (Snow Leopard, Wireshark, crash on startup in 'FcStrListCreate'), but no solution or explanation yet...

Crashes of X11 apps on SL...
<http://lists.apple.com/archives/X11-users/2009/Sep/threads.html#00011>

[avs (avs)]

The Wireshark issue is indeed related and caused by incompatible font caches, I guess. See https://bugs.wireshark.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=3969

[su_v (suv-lp)]

Thanks for the link, I am moving further discussion to the first reported bug #415900 to keep new information in one place (I had marked yours as duplicate of bug #415900, I hope you agree...)