May 2025 - Inkscape Board of Directors

Vote: Create Steamworks account, authorize Direct Fee
by Jonathan Neuhauser 26 May '25

26 May '25

Dear Board, == Background == Since quite some time, Krita is available on Steam (https://store.steampowered.com/app/280680/Krita/). They are "selling" Krita there to support the project financially, while clearly stating in the description that everyone can download it for free on their website. Our developer working group member Vaibhav is looking into setting up something similar for Inkscape. For this, we need a Steamworks account. Apart from that, we've received a request for revenue sharing from a game developer who's using Inkscape for their in-game graphics. This also requires a Steamworks account. The onboarding steps for Steamworks are described here: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/gettingstarted/onboarding In particular, there is paperwork needed (which we need the SFC for), and there is a one-time 100 USD "Direct Fee" for publishing a product on steam for the first time. This fee will be refunded once the product surpasses 1000 USD in revenue. (This is probably intended to avoid spam publications.) I've briefly brought up the topic with Tracy from the SFC today, and she suggested to go ahead with a vote to encourage a fast processing of the paperwork. ;) == Vote == Sign up for a SteamWorks account and allocate 100 USD for the direct fee. After the paperwork has been done by the SFC, Inkscape will be published on Steam at the discretion of the Developer WG / Release manager. a) Agree b) Disagree c) Other: ____ Best regards Jonathan

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Vote: Apple Developer Program
by René de Hesselle 22 May '25

22 May '25

Dear all, Background: ----------- Creating properly signed and notarized releases for macOS requires a paid membership in Apple's developer program. This membership comes in the form of a yearly subscription. So every year we get to decide anew if we see enough value in signing macOS releases to warrant the expense of 99 € that comes with it. It is possible to distribute and use unsigned apps on macOS just like on Windows. The downside is that a user has to take additional (but not overly complicated) steps to make this work while macOS itself discourages people from using unsigned apps. Proposal: --------- We've been creating signed macOS apps since 1.0 and I propose to continue this practice at the expense of 99 €. Additional information: ----------------------- Last year, concerns were raised about me requesting a reimbursement after I've paid for the renewal, stating that this would impede a free choice because people might feel some form of obligation towards me. The vote still passed. You should know: I never followed through with the reimbursement, I ate that cost myself eventually. You are welcome. This year, I'm calling for a vote one month before the renewal is due. Votes: ------ a. Agree to spend 99 € on the Apple Developer program b. Disapprove participation in the Apple Developer program c. Other: ________ Vote closes on May 31st at the latest.

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Inkscape Website
by Martin Owens 21 May '25

21 May '25

Dear Board, I would like to request a budget on behalf of the website/infrastructure team to pay for someone to perform and complete our website upgrade. # Background Now that the ~1.4.1~ 1.4.2 release is done, we can finally deal with a backlogged infrastructure issue. Which is that the website is not currently able to be updated¹. This has happened because the version of the website has been upgraded thanks to work by @pgcd² to move us to a much more modern version of django, django-cms, python etc. As well as fixing up the test suite from multiple mutations. But this work can't be deployed to our webserver. The webserver is also old, and part of the discussion with OSUOSL was upgrading this machine to something newer. They'd like for us to have a machine they control and simply have us deploy our code and data to the new machine. But this comes with a lot of extra hand holding to make sure the web server machine, and a lot of the configuration we've set up on live to cope with bad actors DDOSing our site. As well as doing all the necessary bits to make sure the site is actually deployable in a hands off way. We can't deploy any new fixes to the website until this is unblocked. (For example the recent request to make news articles set in the future, not appear to be published, when they are't (yet)). # Request I'd like to hire pgcd to finish up the work. Partly this step requires someone who can be trusted, to have access to machines, or data, and I'd prefer if that person was legally bound to do the right time. And this is the sort of thing that I'd ideally like us to pay for anyway. I haven't put together the scale of budget this might require. But I think $4k-$6k would be a useful amount to pay for hours necessary at the standard SFC rate. Including having the contractor talk with and coordinate with OSUOSL and cut out some possible bottlenecks when hopping through volunteers. I'd like the new site to go through Fastly CDN for all pages. Not just media pages. So coordination with a new configuration on Fastly will also be needed. Plus testing of a testing site. I'd also like to include the creation and testing of data backups. Something that scared the daylights out of me with our current situation. # Final Thoughts I haven't sent this as a vote as I think it needs a bit of mulling over before we bring it to a vote. So let me know if you can, I'd like to get this sorted out soon though as the target for a test website deployment shouldn't wait until we're in the middle of a new release. Thanks! Best Regards, Martin Owens ¹ Except for some small tweaks which are kept out of tree, Which I don't like doing. But were needed for the DDOS protections. ² See https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape-web/-/commits/master

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Inkscape Developer Meeting, May 10th 2025
by Martin Owens 10 May '25

10 May '25

Dear Developers, Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/64/ Attending: RdH, Martin, Anu, Aarav Oswal, Tav, Adam Belis, Marc Next meeting https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ is the late meeting on a Sunday. Bare this in mind! Release scheduling; René and Martin talk about the building of the 1.4.2 macOSX release. The tag is ready so he'll be uilding those after the meeting. Marc says everything looks good when he looked two days ago, so he went ahead and made the installers and tags. There's over 50 commits of translations because of how weblate works there tends to be multiple commits for each user. We formalise that each protected branch has a translation branch with the pot file updated to that protected branch so translations can happen as soon as posible. Tav has been working on context fill and context stroke which fixes a bunch of issues for inheritance. Including some crashes. Martin and Tav had a disagreement about how tests should be done and did not come to an agreement. Some discussion around the PDF output with various issues that has been spotted. Tav has worked on a crash when text flowed into space and you export selected item. Marc has been trying to draft some stuff on the future of LPEs. Martin suggests meeting to talk about the design. Tav suggests using a switch statement. Generated Items is the more generic name. A discussion develops that goes into some of the possibilities and details. René has been working on the move to the new mac statium infrastructure. Master is already working on the new system. 1.4.x is currently stalled as there are some issues remaining. His next tasks is working on that after the release. Up next will be looking into providing remote access to developers who don't have a macOS machine themselves. René needs to work out how to do it network wise and will provide a proposal for everyone when ready. It can be slow for openGL and we should explain this to people who use the system. Martin asked RdH about the process for doing capypdf in macOSX. We expect a 1.5 release in a year so we have time to work it out at the very least we will have a version for the very latest version. We check upstream macOSX version limitations. Marc reports on the GSoC. We have 5 students who have been accepted. On-Canvas spell checking, UI-Free Inkscape, AI file format support, Recolor Art Work, lib2geom improvements. Martin has worked on some PDF fixes as well as the next steps in design for color management. Running a design meeting this week. We talked about the hotel being paid and the trouble with getting the SFC to make sure this important aspect is finalised safely. Thanks everyone for coming.

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Developer Meeting; May 2nd 2025
by Martin Owens 02 May '25

02 May '25

Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Attending: Mikekov, Martin, Tav, Jonathan, Willy, Velfel, Elendil Next Meeting: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/64/ (May 10th) We start by welcoming Velfet; from Serbia. We talk about topics. They've started by looking into the code and getting familar with how things work. We share advice. Mikekov; Is back to working on the object properties dialog. Will be presenting at the Summit and will hopefully get something deliverable. Jonthan; Announces that he will be stepping away from Inkscape after the Nuerumberg Summit. He's also been working Illustrator work and waiting for GSoC. Tav; Has been working on context-fill and context-stroke issues in rendering and PDF export. Martin has also been working on context work for the new PDF output. Willy; Has got his first feature merged this week. Congratulations! A new settings component which allows a folder to be changed and opened. Has added a new async method for checking if files are valid. Elendil; Has been traveling. Martin; capypdf work and getting frustrated with the CI build system. We talked briefly about the OPSOSL situation and that the PLC is working with the SFC about solving it. We worked on merge requests for 20 minutes, reviewing tricky code requests. Big thanks to everyone! We talked about the introduction of an AI policy in the developer team. We want to know if the quality of contributions will impact review time. Martin brought the question of the roadmap team. He's collecting feedback in order to put together a proposal which can encapsulate the guardrails of what a team would do, and what it's limitations would be. It would involve meeting at least quarterly, and not being a closed team that made up all of the ideas itself, but would instead be responsible for sourcing and combining the ideas in our community into a roadmap. He's asked everyone to think about it and get back to him if they have ideas or want to talk further. Thanks everyone for coming to this week's meeting. Best Regards, Martin Owens

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Today's Status Meeting is Cancelled
by Ted Gould 02 May '25

02 May '25

Hello, Today we're not going to have an chat status meeting. As folks paying attention to the chat will know there's been a funding issue with our hosting provider so we're having an emergency meeting with SFC to discuss options in places of the regular status meeting. Sorry for the late notice. Next status meeting will be June 6th, 2025. Ted

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