August 2024 - Inkscape Board of Directors

VOTE: AI Import Contracting project, take 2
by Jonathan Neuhauser 09 Sep '24

09 Sep '24

Dear all, ===== Background ===== The developer team ist requesting a budget of $10,000 to continue the AI import project. For details, see the attached proposal. ===== Ballot ===== A: Accept the attached proposal by allocating USD 10,000 for the compensation of the contractor and reimbursement of the license. B: Do not continue the AI project. C: Other ___ Thanks in advance, Jonathan

8 10

Developer Meeting Augus 27th 2024
by Martin Owens 27 Aug '24

27 Aug '24

Hey everyone, Thanks to everyone that came to today's meeting. A lot of focus on the release and the tasks needed to get us over the line today. Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Attending: René, Martin, Jonathan, Mikekov, Marc, Tav Next Most exciting thing from René, he has seen the future of macOS CI, because after having talked to someone who is doing this for gstreamer, the tech that allows having the virtualised runners which means you don't need to spend time on build and installation configuration because that's baked into how that would work. The only down side is it requires more hardware resource than we currently have available. the hardware we currently have from mac stadium is currently the smallest size. Though we do want to move towards this virtualisation. René is going to meet with Macstatium tomorrow to explain why we need an upgrade to our hardware setup. If that doesn't pan out René will probably make the setup by himself. René has an open MR which is holding up beta3. We had a look at how important it was to have this fix in time for beta3. We've decided to make a beta3 without the raster image extensions so we can get things tested. The pencil target for RC target for September 13th. Jonathan reports his mentoring of the GSoC project for the aidesign file format by Manpreet. The project is pretty much done and has a fantastic release ready code which will be in 1.4. There was a fraudulent zendesk help site which sent users to a fraudulent website. This was taken down. Jonathan gave the background to the previous adobe illustrator importer. He believes we understand what went wrong and we think we can continue the work with a known developer who knows how to develop these kinds of extensions. He will make a vote to fund the proposal after this meeting. Tav talked with pono yesterday about the rate and a base rate of $40 per hour extendable for local conditions. We're looking for 100 hours. The team held a vote to formally request the funding from the PLC. The vote was 6 in favor, zero against. Scour is now inside the inkscape project, if no one comes to help it it will be on the GSoC list of available project. It's not written with the new extensions system and has a lot of duplicate code. Mikekov is working on the popup editing feature for inkscape in the object properties. It's a work in progress. Martin suggests splitting out any refactoring so it's easier to review if there is any. Martin asked Tav if he could do an assessment on the open bugs for 1.4. Marc completely rewrote the debian packaging for the PPA, this only works on 24.10 because that is the first version that has all the packages we require for Gtk4. And only for AMD64 as there are some test failures on other platforms. There are a bunch of extra fixes for the debian packaging for language and extensions including splitting out inkex. We have a look at fininasing what's needed for 1.4 See you all next time! Best Regards, Martin Owens

1 0

Developer Meeting Aug 19th 2024
by Martin Owens 19 Aug '24

19 Aug '24

This week we had a highly technical meeting with our core developers. Meeting: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Attending: Martin, Jonathan, Mikekov, pbs, Rafael, René Next Meeting: August 27th, 2024 Issue with the windows build for 1.4, a missing dep maybe for ImageMagic, Marc edited it just an hour ago. The way 2geom is imported has been corrected, but the CI builder doesn't do the right thing for testing. PBS presents the issue of using asyinc coroutines for the Gtk4 dialogs. There's a way to wrap the gtkmm calls to be coroutine compataible. PBS asked about using getThing() or jsut thing() in API design. Martin tends towards using get when calculating but goes for whatever is around it when editing code. Martin takled with René about the crossink status and how much work we have to do to get windows builds to work in wine. We talked about using a VM vs. using crossink and how important it is to get developers to comile and test issues with windows builds. We talked about getting fixes into upstream Gnome, Gtk project and some of the technical and social barriers to to doing that. Is Gtk portable or is it crossplatform? We need to know what Gtk thinks these mean to know what their mission is so we can best fit their expectations. Jonathan talked about mentoring his GSoC student for the afdesigner importer. The student needs to write up what he's done and most of the things are supported in the donated files. He found out what clipboard data is available, curiously afdesigner makes an x-inkscape-svg clipboard type. But we'd still use the afdesigner importer for that. Jonathan brought up how we want to re-organise extensions. Mikekov has gotten back into reviewing some of the designs and implimenting them for the object properties dialog. We talked about how the update process works which is too corse at the moment. Rafael was working on the marker tools and is doing a top down rewrite including the on canvas marker editing. Martin talked about doing the color stuff in python and support and testing it. Will support a couple of the new CSS module 4 color formats for exporting. That's it for this week. Thanks everyone for coming to this week's meeting. Best Regards, Martin Owens

2 1

Developer Meeting, Aug 11th 2024
by Martin Owens 11 Aug '24

11 Aug '24

Hey everyone! Meeting: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Attending: Martin, skipper, Marc, René, Raven King, Ishaan, Tav, pbs Next meeting: 19th August We talked briefly about the hardware program and Adam leaving and the SFC's failure. Further details about this will be sent to the plc mailing list soon. # GSoC Skipper wanted to ask about problems with UX follow up now that Adam has left. Vaibhav is the mentor and suggested coming into the meeting to find out how to proceed. Martin talked about a similar issue currently being felt in the node delete tool. Suggested coming to the chat or post an issue where the discussion could be done. Marc recommends making a proposal and use that as a starting point, especially since people who are not happy about it will have to give their arguments. # Beta3 for windows The background is that we have a beta2 which is not functioning for windows users and since we have significant windows issues, then we need to make a beta3 as soon as possible. René says that if we need a beta4 or beta5 because we can't get it working, then so be it. René wants to know if some of the deps need to be updated or not. There are a few things to do. # Release procedure Moving everything to the CI builder so there's much less work to do and we can all know how a release is done. We're still building the 32-bit windows in order to have access to Arm builds. If we had a machine that built for Arm we wouldn't need this. We briefly talked about support and what Inkscape supporting users means. Pbs wants to talk about the broken Debian packaging link and how it's stopped working. We talk about how Debian packaging on launchpad is done and some of the details about how that system works for us as a sort of CI builder. He also fixed some issues with the AppImage builder, specifically to do with CJK support. But the fix isn't available to Inkscape 1.4 because of how it would be built with upstream libraries. Philip wanted help with the AppImage but there weren't anyone in the meeting who knew AppImage very well. Recommended to post to the mailing list. # Procedures We talked about how to create merge requests, and what is expected of developers. Assigning themselves to issues, reviewers and keeping their local admin clean to help other contributors. We talked about spaghetti code and various issues with trying to keep the code tidy. We talked about limiting the merges to master to people who have two factor authentication enabled on Git Lab. # Other items Is there still font issues on windows for user installed fonts? We think this is fixed, but we're not sure. Spellchecking has stopped working on master. It looks like an upstream issue. Philip was working on GUI free Inkscape and tab based Inkscape, which was too much to do at once. Tav did some of the groundwork for this with things like SPDesktop. # Activity We worked on merge requests for 1.4.x at the end of the meeting. Best Regards, Martin Owens

1 0