March 2023 - Inkscape Board of Directors

Election Update and Notes
by Ted Gould 16 Mar '23

16 Mar '23

So I'm happy to report that we finally have a fully signed FSA that sets up a much larger definition of memberships in the Inkscape project. And so we're looking at finally filling the empty PLC slots. Marc has sent out an update to the election procedure to match the current FSA. Once that is done we can then do a vote to setup the election. A couple of things we need to figure out before all that: - We need someone who wants to proctor the election. We've talked with Pono and he's willing to take on that role for this election. I think that's generally a good idea so there isn't any concern about folks in the project biasing the results. But if other folks have ideas it'd be nice to get those out before a vote is considered. - We need to know how many slots are open to be filled. Some folks I've talked to have suggested that doing PLC duties they didn't feel like was the best use of their time to give to the project. There's no shame in that. But it would be much easier to run a single election than another one in a month or two. So if you're a PLC member that is thinking that you don't want to be, now would be a good time to voice that. Excited to move this forward and get to the next steps in getting a full PLC. Ted

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PLC Meeting today
by Ted Gould 16 Mar '23

16 Mar '23

Hello folks, I'm at a work event this week, and looking at our schedule today I don't think that I'll be able to attend the PLC meeting. Sorry. I was hoping to make it work. I'm happy to have someone else lead the meeting or I can run it next week if needed. Or we can just do it the week of the hackfest. Sorry again, Ted

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Developer Meeting March 10th 2023
by doctormo＠gmail.com 11 Mar '23

11 Mar '23

Hi Everyone, Another week, another developer meeting. Thank you to everyone who responded with enthusiasm for having these notes available. I'm going to see how long I can continue to write them for y'all. Present: Tav, PBS, Martin, Mikekov, Jabier, Paopre, Jonathan, René, Vaibhav # Hackfest The hackfest is in a few days! Most people will arrive early on Monday, two members are arriving late in the evening and will have to book a hotel for the night as there's pretty tight restrictions on arrival at the venue. René will be giving further details about meals and other details, check the wiki for full details. This goes for leaving the venue too. We will be expected to be entirely gone by Friday and 6pm. Several people will be making their way to the city to hang out, or book into their next hotels if they're leaving at a later date. We have a bunch of ideas of things to do during the hackfest. Several people will probably want to conference seperately or hack in their hotel rooms if there's too much activity in the conference room. # Release Alpha, is held up by a few merge requests, we're trying to unclog the delay. - Marc wasn't present, but we have some questions to ask about how the release process is going. - René has everything in thanks to Mikekov - Jabier has two merge requests, we reviewed them. A Drag and drop has been tested but should be defered as it's not high priority. - PBS has a few issues he wants to fix before the alpha is released, One is an async rendering issue with rectangles not being selectable immediately after creation. The other is a missing library on windows called 'libangle' detected by lb90. - Reverting the Undo changes is critical! We looked at a reported crash together in the meeting, but this seems unrelated to the reversion. - The opengl performance on default Gtk on X11 can go down to 1fps with serious issues. It's a problem in Gtk and upstream gives approval for simply forcing gtk to use the image backend renderer. Questions were asked about what was the right course of action. # Other Items - Martin has refactored the export dialog previews to not block on loading large files. Lots of improvements to the export dialog. - The font dialog has a small issue with folders in the font dialog being created, it's creating a system folder when it shouldn't be. - Nico has made good progress with the ai importer this week. He's working about 20 hours a week and progress is steady. - Paopre asked about his proposal to reorganise the test suites so each of the unit tests, integration tests, and others into more formal and defined directories. Advised to document the proposal and present it to the developer team so we can have time to look over it. # Group Activity This week we skipped doing the merge request review and instead did some code review. Walking through the changes involved in the export dialog changes. See https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/-/merge_requests/5148 for details. Thanks everyone for coming. The next scheduled meeting will be after the hackfest, but we'll likely have one at the end of the hackfest instead. Keep up to date with the calendar at https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Best Regards, Martin Owens Inkscape Developer Team

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Notice of resignation from the Inkscape PLC (AKA Inkscape Board)
by C R 07 Mar '23

07 Mar '23

Hey folks. Sorry to offer up two resignations in two days, but I've been losing sleep and realised there are some things which have been bothering me for quite a long time now. I think it boils down to this: My visions for Inkscape simply are not in-line with most of the rest of the project, and this is why I'm offering up my resignation. I firmly believe that PLC seats should be reserved for people who can represent the project's interests, which are decided by those who do the lion's share of contribution. I do not think it's appropriate for people to vote on funding for parts of the project they have no hand in, and as such, I can not bring myself to continue voting on funding things for development, as I'm not a developer. The truth is, that I believe the development team should have final say in the project on this matter, thus my vote would always be "yes" for anything the developers have collectively decided. The same goes for the Vectors, Testers, and any other group within Inkscape - they decide they need funding for x-thing they handle and are responsible for in their part of the project. It's a 100% yes from me, always. I think that's what a truly representative PLC should look like and act like. I do not think that the Vectors should be able to downvote development funds, just as I don't think the developers should be able to downvote vectors funds for the oureach activities that they handle. If a group does not do a thing, considered important for the project, they simply should not vote on those things either. Recently I've seen an increase in attempts to build some processes to ensure "fairness" in funding. While in principle, this sounds like a good idea, I believe it's achieving the opposite. I think it's incredibly unfair to punish those who have and do contribute constantly to inkscape, because of supposed "conflicts of interest". This was made crystal clear to me recently when I requested funding to make a video under the same terms as last year (not setting any precedent for next year). If it's a conflict of interest for me to request funds, and no one else steps up to request funds on behalf of my video project, I'm stuck in a catch 22 situation, and the video just doesn't get funding. Maybe that's just lack of interest in a video from the Vector's side, but then why should they be in charge of voting down something as essential to outreach as a release video? Let me make it clear - I don't care if it's me or someone else who does the video. If there were someone else with the capability to do it in FOSS to a professional standard at this late hour for this release, I'd just hand it over to them, since me doing it is apparently so contentious within the project. What upsets me is people seem to be voting for what they think the bureaucracy should look like, and not for what would benefit the project most at this time, while organisational efforts are incomplete. I fully understand wanting to put a fair process in place, but not a finger has been lifted all year to do that, and I'm tired of fighting endlessly with people's personal sense of morality, while the project's development and exposure suffers. People seem to want a rigid, inflexible (and entirely undeveloped) process for doing things, and are willing to toss important deliverables for the project under the bus to get their own way. I've loved some of the progress we've made together in getting things funded, but I can't fight everyone on these things and still consider myself a good project representative. I therefore resign, effective immediately. Thanks for your support, friendship and understanding. Hope this isn't too much of a downer for folks. I'm honestly feeling better already. :) For Inkscape, always. -C

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Need new Inkscape project head moderator
by C R 06 Mar '23

06 Mar '23

I'm stepping down as head moderator. Someone else will need to do it. FYI -C

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March 2nd Meeting notes
by Martin Owens 02 Mar '23

02 Mar '23

Developer meeting for March 2nd, Next meeting is March 10th https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Big thanks to everyone who came to this week's developer meeting. Attending: Marc, Jonathan, Martin, NPJ, René, Mikekov, Nicco # Hackfest The hackfest is a week and a half away! Pono is coming to the hackfest, this will be good and it'll be great to see him in person. SFC will pay in advance for the hackfest using an international wire transfer. The money will need to be there by next week if we want this all to work out. But this is good news that there are no further discussions needed to sort this out. Reviews of the wiki as well as the developer introduction page are planned activities. Especially to help GSoC students with their common questions. Marc is planning on working on dithering at the hackfest, other developer have various activities planned for their time at the hackfest. There's no set developer meeting during the hackfest, but every day will be a meeting. Streaming options and interviews are also planned. # Releases and Release Planning Marc has been busy but is planning on releasing an Alpha version this weekend. He wants to check on the windows store release, but is confident that windows builds can be created. René has a specific set of fixes that need to make it into the release because all builds are broken for macOS at the moment. The alpha will wait for this merge request to be complete, and is expected to be complete later today. The openmp library update fixes the latest macOS specific crashes which was only found because someone opened the about screen. Marc needs help uploading things to the Ubuntu PPA regarding cpack. May need to reach out to Ubuntu maintainers to get the process working well. René will remove dithering support in the macOS release because it's not stable and is causing problems. He will also be making an ARM build of the macOS package using our own CI builder infrastructure which should mean we have these builds for alpha. Mikekov has a few merge requests that need attention and wanted clarification on what is acceptable to merge during freeze. At this point we wouldn't stop changes to strings, but we don't want large untestable changes, so most additions will be made on a case by cases basis, but the size of mikekov's changes should be ok. # Importer Project Nicco, Jonathan and Martin did an on-boarding session on Monday, and Jonathan has been working with Nicco all week to guide the creation of the new extension. There's work done on the environment and the testing framework to make sure the entire process is tested and that it fits in with how our existing extensions work. Nicco has been looking into the format specification and putting together the priority for what pieces should be worked on first. Basic shapes are expected to be working by the hackfest time frame. The type of python dialect/parsing programming which is not-object-orientated is interesting to Nicco. Waiting on getting a message out through the Vectors team. # Bug Accelerator Program Martin has published the first blog post detailing the work done for the program last month (Feb). This is the tail end of the month and Rafael will become available this month (March) Other developers are happy with the progress. Instructions have been made on how to encourage and prioritize bugs. Please use the Inkscape 1.3 tag, and increase the priority on issues which should be fixed first. # Gtk4 Upgrade Proposals Jonathan is going to bring the proposal to the hackfest so it can be worked on in person. Mikekov is concerned about the instability and lack of commit access that will be available during the upgrade. Reassurances have been made that the upgrade would not take years to complete and this is one of the reasons we want to commit paid resources to pushing it through at a quicker pace, so we don't block valuable contributions that would otherwise go to waste while Gtk4 upgrades were proceeding. Martin recommends doing a risk assessment at the point where all Gtk3 compatible actions have been completed and the fork to a gtk4 branch is needed. Everyone agrees that Inkscape's main branch should never be in a state where it doesn't compile. Although we might want to freeze work on the UI folder during the upgrade process. # Vectors There's some discussion that the vectors team doesn't have the resources it needs to respond to requests from the developer team and we wonder how we can help. Maybe we need to do more recruitment, or do join activities to raise excitement. It's hard to know what might help. René proposed that the developer team may want to request the production of a release video if there are no objects from the vectors team. Although Martin was more cautious and wanted to instead see if the vectors team could be encouraged or resourced rather than circumvented. This will need to be an ongoing conversation with the members of the vectors team. # Other work - Martin has been working on speeding up the rendering pipeline, specifically the way bounding boxes are calculated over and over again. - Jonathan did a pdfimport frenzy to find issues and ended up opening 11 new bug reports. This might indicate we need more testers for 1.3 to improve our coverage. - Marc wants the old-files text fix to be tested more rigorously before it's accepted. - René says the performance of test running is getting worse and we're not sure why. - NPJ reports that macOS is very fast and wants to congratulate us all on a job well done. # Merge request review We looked at four merge requests. One was given back to the developer (mikekov) and three others were moving code around by new contributors who never go back with comments and so were closed. Thanks everyone! See you all next week.

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VOTE: Funding for Bug Mugs
by C R 01 Mar '23

01 Mar '23

Hey folks! As we wrap up the Bug Migration Game, we'd like to reward our bug movers and people involved with making/running/promoting the game with a bug mug. I'd like approval for (up to) £200 in funds for sending these out to people, though it may wind up being less depending on what deals I can get. This includes cost of ordering them and shipping them out to people. I've attached a mockup of the bug mugs, in case you haven't seen them yet: The vote is for up to £200 in mug and shipping costs. Vote is for 1 week, as is tradition, but would appreciate votes before that to help move things along. Yay: Fund bug mugs for volunteers Nay: Do not fund bug mugs for volunteers Thanks!

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