January 2026 - Inkscape Board of Directors

Bugfix Accelerator 2026.1
by Martin Owens 01 Feb '26

01 Feb '26

Dear Project Leadership, The developer team discussed requesting a fund for bug fixing in the 1.5 branch specifically. This is before a release, it's more about focusing our attention on the many issues in the 1.5 branch and giving us some funding for administration to the bug tracker. Because this may need to be an ongoing program, I will request funding in blocks of three months and we can re-vote the next block on review. I request a budget of $36,000 for 2 x 280 hours of engineering work targeted at bug fixing in the 1.5 release which is approximately 20 hours per week. And like last time $13,500 for 180 hours (15 hours per week) of administration, writing, issues management, priorities, testing and merge requests. Total budget: $49,500 If fewer hours are used per week they can be used and we don't have to vote quite so soon. The recruitment team will be made up of myself and one other Inkscape member who will not be allowed to bid for the work. We will send out a call for interested and available workers to apply for one of the three positions. Reports and meetings as described in the attached document. a. Approve the budget for BFA 2026.1, b. Disapprove c. Something else Thanks everyone. Best Regards, Martin Owens

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Developer Meeting Notes, Jan 29th 2026
by Martin Owens 29 Jan '26

29 Jan '26

Hi all! A busy meeting today! Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Attending: Charlotte, Cesar, Manpreet, Vaibhav, Cesar, René, Mikekov, Philip, ramanshu Next meeting: 6th Feb https://inkscape.org/cals/event/64/ We did some introductions of everyone for anyone new, where we're from and what we interested in. Rene Spend some time in windows related research and CI, we have our own self hosted runner for project members and because Gtk introduced a dependency which isn't available in the gitlab CI runner. Finding alternative ways from new runner infrastructure, a mirror for MSYS2. This is in the research phase. Speed improvements to the windows builder could be improved with downloads and cache collection. The project thanks René for hosting those windows machines. We talked about the windows CI build failing for non-project members and because it's distressing for new contributors, Rene says he'll turn it off for non-project members and it will continue to work for the merge train. We talked about the clang format job and Martin recommended to Philip to talk to the people who set that system up about how strict we should be. Marc was the main contact. For macOS, rene says the current CI doesn't support the latest Tahoe, he's going to wait for infrastructure to catch up. One example of possible future issues is a new icon format we can't generate atm. We talked about an old merge request for a new icon on macOS. René is supporting Gnome by contributing CI and patches as a Gnome Foundation Member. 👍️ Charlotte has been busy, but keeping an eye on some issues, the recent files issue on windows, and some other windows crashes. Mikekov has been working on various UI elements, moving Gtk3 assumptions to Gtk4 technologies for example in themes listing. Mikekov asked René about shipping themes in macOS because the directory contains other things which we don't want to ship for example scss pre- compile CSS. René asked for Mikekov to let him know the details. Mikekov has been working on the transform dialog to separate things out without the refactoring changing functionality. Requests for the merge request to tested before being merged. Philip is replacing the ColorItem with new Gtk4 rendering. Mikekov and Matin suggested API changes which he's going to implement. Martin and Philip talk about the color API, premultiplication and some of the implications for rendering and how values are stored and moved around. Mostly HSL isn't really useful, but Martin is going to allow the widest possible rendering and allow Inkscape to choose what to allow users to do, even if the output is not useful and quite mad. Mikekov wants some more general code for widget rendering and Philip talked about how the code could be separate for ColorItems. Vaibhav has been looking into their merge requests for object properties speed improvements when selecting a lot of path elements in the XML editor for example. We all talk about writing parsers, different ways of writing them effectively and moving away from slower Regex. Manpreet is going to work on the illustrator text support. Martin wanted to know where we are in the support we are and what kind of help or support they might need to get the functionality completed. Ishaan has been dealing with every issue and triaging. ⭐️ Mikekov asked about LGM and events. We don't have a confirmation about events this year, but we can budget and send people to LGM even without an Inkscape specific event. Philip wanted to talk about 1.5 and if it's ready to start scheduling more firmly. Windows has some shop stoppers for 1.5, Charlotte says. Can't type texted, can't resize windows. Upstream Gtk4 issues which aren't getting fixed. Vaibhav reports issues for 1.5 on macOS with windows and drag and drop. Martin is going to push the paid 1.5 Bug Accelerator program forwards in order to get some of this work scheduled. Philip asked about creating an alpha that doesn't impose a hard freeze. Ishaan notes there's a lot of issues for 1.5 already and this isn't prioritised well yet. Hopefully the paid admin position will help with this. René asked about GSoC, but there's no one available to do the admin work and so we're working on No for now. René might be able to do it, but the stars will have to align to allow him to be able to do it. Philip wanted to talk about coroutines and if it would be OK to add out own. Martin says that adding our own should be permissible given the restrictions and advantages, so long as it's done cleanly. The goal is removing the event pumper for file dialog, clipboards and extensions but it will require a lot of refactoring. Dealing with uemf issues now that it's under our control. There's comments from the original maintainer which would be useful to commit as a README. Martin asked that explicit permission be asked before sharing a private communication. That's it for this week. Thanks everyone! Best Regards, Martin Owens

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Developer Meeting, Jan 21st 2026
by Martin Owens 21 Jan '26

21 Jan '26

Hey Everyone, Attending: Martin, Mikekov, Tav This week because it there was a small number of people we did a show and tell. Martin took everyone on a tour of the new rendering engine as it's being built. The audience offered questions and tips on where to improve the documentation to make it all more understandable. Mikekov went through some testing of themes and various issues we might have in Gtk4 for 1.5. Thanks everyone for coming! I was actually a two hour meeting! Martin,

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Developer Meeting Notes, Jan 13th 2026
by Martin Owens 13 Jan '26

13 Jan '26

Hey everyone! Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Attending: Willy, Mikekov, Charlotte, Martin, Tav Tav hasn't done much but did work on some namespace cleanups. Martin and Tav taked briefly about namespaces and how code should be cleaned up, being verbose vs. moving code into the correct namespace. Mikekov has been working on a text combo box widget. Has a look at the pages toolbar, the page size selector is quite advanced and uses cell renderers. In order to update it for Gtk4 it would require components which aren't supported in C++. The main target for this work is the font family. It increases the speed significantly though doesn't have the flexibility of customisation. Charlotte, started a new semesta and new classes so hasn't had a lot of extra time. But has looked at a few bugs, some windows bugs including the drive letter bug. But isn't as intense at the moment. Willy has been working on documentation to improve how people join gitlab and understand it better. Martin has been working on code reviews, some issue testing and the new engine work which is slowly starting to get unpicked from it's knotty integration into every inkscape layer. It reminds me just how hard it is to keep API and code clean when we work with so many people over so long a history. But it's still going to be important for future development to work on that more. A reminder to everyone to add their comments to the on going discussion about the AI policy: https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape-board/-/issues/5 Next meeting is the earlier time, on Wed 21st Jan. Thanks everyone. Best Regards, Martin Owens

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Developer Meeting, Jan 5th 2026
by Martin Owens 05 Jan '26

05 Jan '26

Devs! Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/64/ Attending: Tav, Martin, Mikekov, ramanshu, ltlnx, Ramyak Shama, Vaibhav AI Policy is in progress and in research stage, we discussed some experiments various people had done and a lot of the limitations. And the 2FA policy given to us by the PLC couldn't be discussed as no one who deals with that were present at the meeting. Tav, revisiting the color font stuff and hatches improvements but haven't gotten very far. Mikekov has been on vacation, has been working on merge requests reviews and helping things along. ltlnx, has also been on vacation and has been doing some bug management. Martin has been working on DrawingSurface and has some questions about memory management and Mikekov gave advice about how to manage heap vs. stack construction. ramashu brought a question about thier merge request using Gtk and finding the API for Gtk and the best resources. Mikekov and Martin offered some advice about how to look for documentation. We talked about the problems in gtk4 and the cell renderer no longer using CSS to control the nodes. And the missing icons in the layers and objects dialog. ltlnx wants to talk about roadmap policy and has done some research into other project and what hey are doing. Martin talked about previous discussions about roadmap teams and policy. Vaibhav asked after pono about the steam distribution and how we can distribute Inkscape on steam. No further information was available. We talked about various project organisational steps for the future. Thanks for coming everyone, Martin,

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AI Use Policy Discussion
by Martin Owens 03 Jan '26

03 Jan '26

Dear PLC, Charlotte has kicked off this discussion by creating an issue for us: https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape-board/-/issues/5 the first round is to collect examples of other projects having such policies. If you know of any good examples, can you add them to the issue? Thanks everyone! And thanks Charlotte for running with this important work. Best Regards, Martin Owens

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PLC Meeting Minutes, Jan 2nd 2026
by Martin Owens 02 Jan '26

02 Jan '26

Hey everyone, This is a digest of the meeting we had. You can still have a look at the original text in chat but this is for folks who need a quick run down. Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/46/ (don't forget you can subscribe to the ical link in your calendar) Attending: Martin, pono, Marc, René, Tav, Josh, Jonathan AGENDA * Developer meeting update (doctormo) * Vectors update (Moini) * Student programs; Outreachy, GSoC, etc (Tav) * Security Key Program (Mc) * Infrastructure update (martin) * Current Votes Status (no votes pending) ANY OTHER BUSINESS * Idea for licensing Inkscape on platforms (ted/martin) * Physical meeting for 2026 (jonathan) * AI Policy (René) * Project Management DEVELOPER MEETING The developer meetings are still happening, and regular minutes are sent to the plc. No questions asked for the developer team VECTORS UPDATE Moini wasn't available today, no update. STUDENT PROGRAMS No student programs at the moment. GSoC 2026 deadline coming up. February 3 deadline for GSoC. Tav is going to step back from GSoC this year. We have an open position/prospect for GSoC. If we don't find someone to run it, we'll skip this year. Jonathan might have enough time during the GSoC coding period, so they'll think about it. Martin asked Tav to do a hand off to a new person, pono recommended recording the details in a document. René wants to check is infrastructure tasks count as coding for GSoC. SECURITY KEY PROGRAM Martin asks to drop this from the agenda. Marc wants to find a way to enforce 2FA for infrastructue. Martin uses FreeOTP, so we can recommend different options. Mc says perhaps we can just have a policy: "if you have <some access to be defined> then you can be rimbursed for <up to some amount> of a security hardware key buy" Agenda item moved to developer team meeting. INFRASTRUCTURE UPDATE Martin has a meeting with Ben coming up to discuss the second part of the website upgrades. Taking credit cards, improving speed, etc etc. A vote will be posted directly to the mailing list when the general outline is ready. No change for the matrix chat replacement. Rocket chat went down for half a day or so, Mc got it running again. No issues that I know of with GitLab, or the CI runners. LICENSING INKSCAPE Has been discussed in our dev meeting a little, and is something to idea-taste. Martin and ted had a discussion after the meeting with the Audacity owners about how Inkscape can leverage the trademark to create an opportunity for a commercial venture to license exclusive rights to publish Inkscape, for money, in one of the various app stores where our support is weakest. The agreement would basically be: commercial venture agrees to do engineering and support that platform's app store, kicks back a percentage of revenue to the SFC and we give them exclusivity in that app-store. The example raised for the Windows App Store, where we suffer from not being able to attract windows developers and in this case it would be the case that we would still offer windows builds from our website, but the commercial venture would offer Inkscape in the App Store there. Trying to balance access and getting resources into the project. Ponoi likes the idea and will bring it up with the SFC interally (Rick and Karen) on the 23rd Jan, Martin will remind him to do so. Some discussion was had about some of the considerations and pitfalls. PHYSICAL MEETUP 2026 Two possible meetup locations; FOSDEM January 31/Feb 1, LGM (April 22- 25, Nuremberg) Possibly copying the program from last years meetup at the castle. Depending on if we can book again. Need to find people to help organise. Martin recommends asking for help by sending an email to mailing lists etc. AI POLICY Agenda item defered to the developer team meeting, the plc doesn't have anything to decide here as it's a technical question. But it should be answered before the GSoC kicks off (if it does). PROJECT MANAGEMENT René has someone who might be interested in doing volunteer project management. Too early to tell. No details on what this involves. Martin points to Krlr17 who was contracted to help with the bug accelerator program as an admin type work. END MEETING Thanks everyone for coming and staying late. Hope everyone had a good New Year and is ready for a great 2026.

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