May 2024 - Inkscape Board of Directors

VOTE: Working group policy
by Jonathan Neuhauser 14 Jun '24

14 Jun '24

Dear all, ===== Background ===== Following discussions at the Bensberg Hackfest, we have drafted a Working Group policy. From a PLC perspective, this makes "teams" well-defined entities, to which we can assign responsibilities and give decision powers. I've incorporated the comments I received since last week, so now we vote on it. ===== Ballot ===== A: I accept the Working group policy as attached. B: I don't want a working group policy at all. C: Other / I require the following modifications: ___ Thanks in advance, Jonathan

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Vote: Apple Developer Renewal 2023
by Jonathan Neuhauser 04 Jun '24

04 Jun '24

Dear all, it's this time of the year again! Background: ----------- René de Hesselle (RdH) has been preparing our OSX builds for a while, to do that he needs to be able to sign them with an Apple Developer Account. We have reimbursed him last year for this account so that he could continue to sign builds for Inkscape. This is to renew that account so he can continue to sign OSX builds. Proposal: --------- Reimburse RdH for the membership renewal expenses for Apple's developer program. This is estimated to cost 99€. Votes: ------ a. Reimburse RdH for the program b. No, cease participation in Apple's Developer Program c. Other: ________ Best regards, Jonathan

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Developer Meeting Notes 31st May 2024
by Martin Owens 31 May '24

31 May '24

Hey fellow Developers, Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Attending: Marc, Adam, Martin, Ishaan, Jonathan, Mikekov, Vaibhav, Rafael Next event: Sat June 8th We talking about quotation marks and spelling reform in European languages. This was just a bit of fun while wiating for people to join. --------- Jonathan starts of the meeting by sharing a link to the Working Group policy document. The PDF file was missing from the website so Martin is adding it to the PLC team on the website so everyone can download it and follow the template. Martin talked about the two pots of powers that the working group policy wants to help define. The first is the powers that the project leadership comittee vests int he team regarding things like spending money and using the trademark. Jonathan adds that making a release for example is using (or trading) on Inkscape's mark. The second set of powers are things that anyone from any team could do, but that we want to monopolise those tasks and decisions into the team. For example making and "official" facebook group could be done by anyone, but the vectors team would probably want to monopolise the decision making process for that. Jonathan: If you want to initalise something, it should be clear who you have to ask and who doesn't have veto power. Martin wants the list of reponsibilities to be more definitive if possible. The team works through the template for the working group policy to make a draft, each developer was invited to partipate and suggest things: ----------- DRAFT CHARTER -------------- Name of the Working group: Development team Purpose: • Development of the Inkscape software Delegation • Manage and maintain the Inkscape git repository (i.e. deciding what gets merged, creating protected branches) • Decide about the build system (which systems developers can work on, which systems are supported) • Decide about dependencies, technical consultation with up- and downstream projects • Schedule, perform and publish all release stages, assess the stability of the release • Paid development affecting the Inkscape git needs to consult the dev team first before going to the PLC Additional Responsiblities: • Manage the CI infrastructure and configuration • Point of contact for vulnerability reporting • Onboarding new developers who want to contribute, provide developer mentorship (internally or through programs like Google Summer of Code, Outreachy) • Maintain developer-facing documentation, including Getting Started resources Interactions with other teams / working groups: • informing the Documentation team about relevant changes for releases, such as new or changed features • coordinate with the Testing team to maintain the bugtracker(s), make decisions about available tags, priorities / schedule • changes in the user interfaces should be coordinated with the UX team Meetings and (internal) communication: approx. weekly meeting as video call, announced at least a week prior on the project calendar; regular communication via chat.inkscape.org in team_devel Decision making process: by consensus of a quorum of 3 or more people Membership criterion: Initial members: Jonathan Neuhauser, Marc Jeanmougin, Martin Owens, Mike Kowalski, PBS, Rafael Siejakowski, René de Hesselle, Tavmjong Bah, Vaibhav Malik New members are confirmed by at least two current members. After two years of inactivity, members can be removed. ----------- END CHARTER -------------- The plan is to draft this over the comming week and make a decsion about the WG charter. Please get in touch if you have comments and suggestions. -------------- Developer activity: Vaibhav wanted to talk with Mikekov about the font collections, the team discusses how stable 1.4 is and what issues we're fixing and targeting for the release. He worked on a bunch of UI fixes. Addressing a freeze in the file selector dialog. Most of the program hours are consumed, will be reporting to Martin tomorrow for the blog post. Jonthan is jumping into fixing C++ bugs and is mostly done with the work he wanted to do on extensions. Martin has been working mostly on the color branch and fixing some issues with the bug accelerator program, not many hours used this month. Mikekov asked about clipping colors. Mikekov trying to work on the proposal from adam for fill and stroke styles. A couple of MRs and Martin wanted to talk about sp_desktop_style Rafael, some time into the sp-marker refactoring. Rewriting how sp- shapes create markers with about half the amount of code. The goal is to fix a lot of the issues and write tests and also improve the speed of the drawing system. There is still a lot of work for future reafactoring. Ishaan has been investigating how cairo draws lines. How the device scaling works. Big thanks to everyone who came and stayed the extra time to process the charter with us. Best Regards, Martin Owens

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Developer Team Meeting Notes, Thu May 23rd 2024
by Martin Owens 23 May '24

23 May '24

Hey everyone, Big thanks to the large number of people who were able to come to this week's meeting. We went long again because of how many great conversations we had about all sorts of things you can read below. Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Attending: Martin, Tav, Mikekov, Adam, René, ScislaC, skippr, Vaibhav, Ishaan. Marc Next event: Friday May 31st 2024 Tav wanted to talk about merge request 6446, a clarification and icon improvement set of changes to improve how icons get in toolbars get collapsed togther. Tav talked about the functionality and adam expressed how important it was to UX for this merge request to get in to 1.4. The developer team will ask translators to make sure the four extra strings won't be an issue. René has fixed the CI again for 1.4.x, the extensions were updated without checking if the tests were passing. René expresses his anger at having a broken CI for a couple of weeks and wants to make sure that everyone makes sure not to force merges in with test failures. Next week will be looking into the extensions deps requirement for FontConfig and text parsing. Martin talked about the review of the new text features in python/inkex extensions. This will likely get into 1.5 considering the large numbers of changes that will be needed in order to get it to the quality expected of the inkex internal API. Vaibhav, last week most of the week has been working on issues with the FontCollections dialog. Has fixed a bunch of issues and collected them into one MR. Adam has been testing a lot of merge requests and the developer team and we thank him. Vaibhav, Adam confirm they got an email from pono about the hardware purchases. Tav left early so we don't know, but assume he also got one. Marc, tried to find a good way to build master on all operating systems. Josh tested it on 24.04 and confirmed that this should now refix it. Marc is now 800 emails behind in his commitment to read all the activity because of the exceptional bug triaging by Adam these last two weeks. Mikekov, wants to thank Josh for testing his merge request finding an issue in the export dialog. It throws an exception because of it, but the display code keeps crashing out and hiding the real cause. Martin also got caught out with the problem since a thrown error doesn't show in the backtrace any more. Catching the error might be sensible. Marc wants to know when to when we should publish the next beta. Adam thinks there's still time. René asks if we should have a slot for bug triage for the bug accelerator program. Adam agrees. We still have some regressions, some blockers but we are making good progress. Jonathan has put some thinking into how to make released more fun to work on, especially bugs. Maybe some mugs and t-shirts to fix bugs. Jonathan fixed a third of the issues in tthe extensions tracker when he first joined and it's fun, it can be be for people to fix issues. Thought people do have different motivations. A good conversation was had by various people about how to improve developer attention on bugs in general. Jonathan and Adam have been thinking about how to ask users to help us fund these activities more and being more up front with our needs as a project. We've been looking at Thunderbird as a model for how to present these requests to users. Jonathan wanted to add it in for 1.4, though Martin and others suggest that with string freeze an exception might be required to get it in for 1.4 and a meeting with Maren would be a good idea. Martin suggests that spending the time and getting it right then releasing it as 1.4.1, and making sure we're coordinated to measure what the impact will be. We want to know what kind of response we get from users when we explain the situation we're in and designing the interface properly. Trying hard to get credit card transactions lined up beforehand if possible. Ishaan has had a slow week but was able to fix an issue with updating tiles with his new make selection in inkscape prettier merge request. Mikekov has some questions regarding colors, and mikekov and adam share their work on their ux issue which will take a while to get all working. Martin talked a little about the color branch and how this will all fit together. Jonathan wants to highlight the completion of the new working group policy. We will formalising how teams exist and their reponsibilities. We will be transforming the developer team to the developer working group, wwe need a charter which will be submitted to the plc. We'll review and spend next week's meeting May 31st. See everyone next week!

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Developer Meeting Notes, May 7th 2024
by doctormo＠geek-2.com 10 May '24

10 May '24

Hey devs, Sorry for the delay getting these notes out, hectic week of waking up early to attend the summit live feed video. Big thanks to the Renesse folks for keeping that live for the summit for Me, Jonathan and Rene. Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Attending: Marc, Adam, Mikekov, Tav, Rafael, Martin, Rene, Ben, Ishaan, Frederico Mana Quintero Next Event: May 15th 2024 Team "Renesse" at the Inkscape hosted summit in France: very busy with lots of things :) Some of them being: - Improving the UX of asking users to donate in Inkscape application and website - Discussing a possible hover based workflow for fill and stroke - Possible Fill and Stroke dialog simplification - PDF Text Import Improvements - SPMarker refactoring Rene: worked on fixing Windows CI for some breaking changes introduced by Gitlab Ben: introduced themselves and asked for suggestions on programming for Inkscape, various useful suggestions offered. Martin: asked for review of his color work. Is working on bug accelerator program. For the bug accelerator program, the quality of the prioritisation of the issues is concerning and we may need to hire a triage specialist for future programs to get better use out of our programmers. We updated the extensions in 1.4.x to the latest versions during the meeting. Ishaan: The fix custom user css for handles is ready for review. Asked for a review of Styling hierarchy in "Selection improvements" Frederico was invited to talk about the work he's doing on librsvg rendering. https://gnome.pages.gitlab.gnome.org/librsvg/devel-docs/render_tree.html some of the same issues apply to inkscape's renderer with cairo. Frederico was shown our renderer stack in case there's things to learn from the way with do bounding box calculations. See you all next time! Best Regards, Martin Owens

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Request for comments: Working Group Policy
by Jonathan Neuhauser 08 May '24

08 May '24

Hi all, Martin, René and I have had another attempt to create the Working Group policy. Please see the attached draft; I'll incorporate all comments that come in until next Wednesday (May 15), and create a vote. Best regards Jonathan

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About Screen Contest: Inkscape Contributor Voting
by Kyle R. Conway 06 May '24

06 May '24

Calling all Inkscape Contributors! It's time for you to cast your votes for the Inkscape 1.4 About Screen Contest! Round one has elevated 5 artworks into top contention as favorites from the Inkscape community with 855 total ranked votes from 251 voters. As Inkscape Contributors, you are the final panel of judges to vote for their favorites to award the next winner of the About Screen Contest that will be featured in the next release! Voting begins Monday, April 22, 2024 and ends at 11:59 UTC on Monday, April 29, 2024, so be certain to cast your vote soon! How does this work? We're using ranked choice voting, which means you can vote for many artworks. Click the checkbox on any artworks you'd like to vote for from the ones you like the most to the ones you like the least. They'll be re-arranged from your top selection to your bottom. Vote for as many or as few of the entries as you'd like! (Each Inkscape Contributor may only vote for each artwork once). Cast your vote here: https://inkscape.org/gallery/=artwork/inkscape-14-about-screen-contributor-… These are the 5 items the community voting elevated for the final round (in alphabetical order): - "Creative Growth“ by Chris Hildenbrand - "Expand Your Creative Universe" by Chris Hildenbrand - "Inkscape's Path-Artist's Blossom" by Inkonic - "Draw your world" by Kess - "Vibe On Creators" by NDIM DONALD Step 1: Make sure that you are an Inkscape Member (see previous message or link below), and if you're not one yet, apply for membership and ask 3 of your team mates or other contributors whom you have worked with to confirm your membership. More info: https://inkscape.org/*membership/blog/inkscape-signs-new-fsa-sfc/ Step 2: Visit https://inkscape.org/gallery/=artwork/inkscape-14-about-screen-contributor-… and rank the 5 images by clicking on the little circle right below them in order of preference (most liked first). Thanks for all of your work on Inkscape! Kyle

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