September 2023 - Inkscape Board of Directors

VOTE: Contract extension for dboles
by Jonathan Neuhauser 06 Oct '23

06 Oct '23

Dear PLC, this is a vote to extend Daniel Boles' contract for another two months (320 hours) and allocate additional budget at the request of the development team. Background: - Daniel was originally hired for the GTK4 migration. This is making good progress: as of now, the development team estimates that a first version of Inkscape that builds with GTK4 will be available around the time his current contract ends. - By all accounts, the progress has been very steady, also including general code cleanups which however did not distract him from his main task. We were impressed by his knowledge, speed, and contribution quality. By now, Daniel has 174 MRs merged. - However, there are will be no more hours to spend for debugging, fixing regressions, and upstream bugs. Daniel now has in-depth knowledge of Inkscape's codebase as well as his GTK4 expertise. He would be a very valuable asset going forward, so we feel it would be great to have him available for some additional time. - He has expressed interest to take on a permanent position somewhere and in that case would finish the contract part-time. This might be an even better deal for us, as he can take on a "consultant / technical support" role, on an as-needed basis, e.g. fixing difficult bugs and helping other contributors to move their work to GTK4. This is possible under the terms of his (current) contract: it allows to submit invoices over the course of a year, for a total of 320 hours. The same model would apply to the extension of his contract. - If he - which we currently don't expect - runs out of work related to GTK4, there's enough other technical debt that he can work on. Ballot: a) Extend Daniel Boles' contract for another two months (320 hours) under the same conditions as his previous contracts; the work items will be (ordered by priority, as time permits) - finishing the GTK4 migration, - fix regressions in the GTK4 build of Inkscape, including upstream work, - assist other contributors in updating their work for GTK4 if requested, - work on other technical debt in the Inkscape codebase and allocate $16,000 for his compensation. b) Don't extend Daniel Boles' contract. c) Other: ______ Best regards, Jonathan

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Developer Meeting Notes - Sept 18th 2023
by doctormo＠gmail.com 19 Sep '23

19 Sep '23

Dear Developers, Thanks to everyone who came to this week's meeting. Attending: Marc, Martin, René, S.Ourchene, Tav, Jabier, Ishaan, Amenzou Meeting: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Next Date: Tuesday September 26th, 2023 Portable Apps wish for us to distribute the windows64/32 build for Inkscape 1.3. The releases policy we talked about and seems reasonable is to offer trust to fellow members who are working within the project who document the scripts and process for how the release is put together. An email has been sent back to invite them to particpate more closely and document their work. Everyone took turns to ask Tav questions about text. It's ask Tav day! Some looking at merge requests and issues, one about how to process text in the layout. Tav worked on the toolbar Gtk4 work and researching all the items that are needing for all the new widget allocations. Marc wants the toolbar work to use a merge commit, instead of squashing the commit. Tav and Rene wants to do this work collectively at the next developer meeting. Ishaan has continued working on the updates for the website. Working through each of the possible breaking changes progressively in a private branch. Rene wanted to know when 1.3.1 might be released, Martin says he's expecting November time, Marc says we need to commit all our backports which is a task for Martin in the coming weeks. Jabier has a MR that is ready to be reviwed. 5763, it needs feedback from adam. Martin has been working on CMS improvements with a UI improvement merge request which is being reviewed by designers mostly. Good feedback about the process of desktop preference profiles vs. document profiles and future work needed on color pickers. Tav has some concerns that we wouldn't be able to build AppImages with Gtk4. Marc says that there are ways around the restrictions, but we may have to ask for some backports upstream to help us with the process. See you all next week! Best Regards, Martin Owens

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Developer Meeting - Sept 10th 2023
by Martin Owens 10 Sep '23

10 Sep '23

Dear Devs, Thanks to everyone who came to today's developer meeting. Attending: Martin, Jonathan, Tav, Hendrick, Hash, Ishaan, Jabiertxo, PBS Calendar: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Next meeting: Monday, September 18th # Extensions Jonathan has been completing his speed and API improvements to the extensions style based API. Martin has continued work on the CMYK PDF Exporter, is planning on producing a CMYK JPEG and TIFF exporter as part of the work needed for that, but it should provide extra functionality outside of the PDF work. It may need more packaging work for the binary Python Image Library or another color management library support, will know more in the coming weeks. # Improvements Hendrick - Second time in this meeting, really interesting starting work on Inkscape and like last time he's focusing on the maths side for offsetting paths. If one thinks about it from the maths side instead of the code side he sees a lot of room for improvement. In a process of discovery and keeping some attention on performance. Lib2Geom is quite nice because it's quite fast and they can be used for the pure maths construction. For example a cubic bezier curve it only checks a couple of points to test how good the approximations are and we can do better. Jabier worked on an improvement to the spray tool. Martin has a question about backporting tool improvements after all the event refactoring for Gtk4. Special merge requests will be needed and tested for each instance. # Gtk4 Work Tav and PBS has been working on Gtk4 stuff, getting very close to working on Gtk4 directly. The big project currently in the toolbar work. There are a couple of bugs with a couple of widgets which change size or that cause the window to change size when you change tools. But it's usable so we can merge it in sooner. PBS has been working on Gtk4 branch, we should keep to using a public shared branch to reduce the duplicate work if we're working from private branches. # Infrastructure Jonathan has been working on the paid projects work with pono and Martin, a small confusion has pono talk to Karen before we were finished drafting and he got the wrong idea of the proposal. We need to be clearer where in the process we are during drafting. We need to move to C++20 and use the CI builder to know if some feature is available in the build system. AppImage targets Ubuntu 20.04, Martin suggests using a PPA to install new Gnu tools, but Marc wasn't available so we don't know what the real limitations are. Ishaan has been working on improving the website to a new Django version. Wanted to know what kind of policy we should have for upgrading libraries when they are deprecated. Best Regards, Martin Owens

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