VOTE: Contract extension for dboles
by Jonathan Neuhauser
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
1 month, 3 weeks
Developer Meeting Notes - Sept 18th 2023
by doctormo@gmail.com
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
2 months, 2 weeks
Developer Meeting - Sept 10th 2023
by Martin Owens
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
2 months, 3 weeks