- 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

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Developer Meeting, Sept 4th 2024
by Martin Owens 04 Sep '24

04 Sep '24

Hey everyone, Time for our regular developer meeting notes. Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Attending: Martin, Eledil, Jonathan, Marc, Mikekov, Tav, Ishaan, René Next Meeting: September 12th, (but there is also a PLC meeting on Friday) Beta3 is not perfect because it produces a custom string in the version string which needs to be cleaned up. Marc's certificate expired and needs to renew it. We don't have an official certificate, there is a way around that if we used Azure as a CI builder. We are releasing beta3 today, we had it on draft by accident and have now got it out the door for windows testing specifically. There is an outstanding vote, for hiring a contractor to finish the ai extension. Please make sure you get your votes in for today. Jonathan and Martin talked about the color extensions refactoring branch that is ready for review. Martin will proceed to work on the pdf out extension to add all that color support that now exists. They talk a bit about extensions progress bars and how to get pdf and other things. Jonathan is worried about the speed with a large text file. And how to treat text. Mikekov, has continued work on the object dialog and working on styles. There are a bunch of issues to do with signals and propagation and Martin suggests using signal keys to identify where an update modifier signal has come from. We will discuss this issue further in the chat room. Tav has been working on an Importance Critical bug; when you right click on a spin button it would pop up a menu, that was not the case in 1.4. The menus were mostly used for when the toolbar got too small and there was a menu for each thing that fell of the bar. During the refactoring this feature got removed as not being important. He has a merge request to put them back. An empty call will generate a few useful values even if it's empty. Martin will review. Elendil, if you have an svg file with a css file. The CSS dialog is currently parsing the CSS itself manually and could do with refactoring. The patch code with a comment explaining it should be ok for now as it retains more functionality than retaining the comments would. René is continuing his work on the cross-compiling and Martin's MR to improve that capability. And will help with the version thing. Ishaan will be giving a workshop on Inkscape at a FOSS conference, Bangalore, India. Mikekov; some of our tools are very special. The sp-desktop-style setting and getting is quite broken right now. There's a lot of issues with how these styles are processed before dialogs get access to them. Tav and Martin talk about text object selection with tspans. Ishaan asked about tablet code in master, it had to be removed and now had to be reimplemented. We may need to just review it and make sure we are using the new APIs as intended and that those features are available to windows and macOS users. See you all next time. Best Regards, Martin Owens

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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

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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

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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

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W3C WG Charter
by Martin Owens 05 Jul '24

05 Jul '24

Hey guys, Is this anything we need to pay attention to? https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-new-work/2024Jun/0012.html They've been posting it on social media, is this part of the move to part svg into a non-active mode within their org? Martin,

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Developer Meeting Notes; 2nd July 2024
by Martin Owens 02 Jul '24

02 Jul '24

Hi Everyone, A quiet meeting this month, most issues were chatting about details, some omitted here. Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Attending: Mikekov, Martin, Tav, René, Ishaan Next meeting: July 10th 2024 * Martin and Tav reviewed the Bug accelerator program, making sure hours and tasks completed are reported and how the program might be improved next time. Finding issues to do was an issue for Tav who didn't have the link to the milestone page. * René wanted to review the release plan with Marc taking a break. We won't know more about if we'll have a tag this week or next but we'll try and keep everyone up to date. * Several people now don't have access to the Rocket Chat, because we are hesitant to upgrade it but at the same time need Jonathan and René and others to be able to continue to access the chat from their phones. * Tav reviewed the GSoC projects and each of the students. * We talked about macOS and some os the issues there now Tav has had a chance to look at some os the issues. We talked about the way the recent files' menu doesn't have tooltips and how to help remidy that. Some issues with fonts, some issues with Gtk4 were discussed. * Mikekov has been working on the supplimental color pickers and color wheel improvements. He's added a new color wheel type and has been looking of the speed issues with the new code. * Several people have had issues compiling on windows linking errors. Mikekov gave up trying to do development on windows for now. * We all reviewed the terrible delay in getting computers bought by the project and how we can work around the issue by buying the machines are getting reimbursed from the SFC instead. This is the action that Tav has taken, and Adam may also do this. Though we are aware of the restrictions this places on people who don't have the capital to purchas machines out of their own pockets. So we need a better system in any case. * Ishaan got a macOS from work and has been testing various things in 1.4 and 1.5. 1.5 seems to have the best experience on macOS. Has continued to work on selection changes, currently stuck on a problem with units. Martin helped walk through all the different coordinate systems in inkscape. * Ishaan also wanted to ask about a new contributor who is having issues building windows but is always communicating in private messages despite being asked not to. Ishaan wanted advice on how to handle it. Martin gave some advice about being clear and setting boundries and explaining why it's a problem to ask in the wrong channels. Hopefully it won't need more moderation. Best Regards, Martin Owens

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Developer Meeting, June 24th 2024
by Martin Owens 24 Jun '24

24 Jun '24

Today is a combination SFC catchup and developer meeting. Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Attending: Martin, Ishaan, Mc, MikeKov, pono, Ravi, René, skippr, Tav, Vaibhav Next event: 2nd Jul 2024 First SFC item was computers for Adam, Tav and Vaibhav. Pono said he'd work on these items today after his two other meetings. Second pono mentioned that the SFC is on it's way to being able to set up Patreon for us. There's some questions about how we should position ourselves on the platform if we wanted to join, and we defer the discussion for later. Third SFC item is about reviewing our trademark policy after the last time we touched it with Chris Roger's book and he thinks it's time to review now while there are no issues outstanding. Update on the release and the beta2 so we can continue the process. René and Marc are happy to make a release in the coming week and Martin suggests Friday the 28th. Marc says he'll be able to tag on Thursday the 27th and then René and others can build and publish the beta2 release over the weekend to have the final beta2 published by Sunday 30th. We will inform Maren and the other people who are involved in documentation and release notes and how much time they might need for the final release. Tav has been getting inkscape to work on his new Inkscape provided mac mini. Eventually using the René is holding off buying an Arm processor surface windows machine as it's quite expensive. Despite the promises of them being better machines. René had a look at the gimp code and how they are building Gtk3 for macOS. There's still some issues with our build and there may be things we can learn from them. Though what we can learn in time for any Gtk3 release we plan to do is an open question. Mikekov has been working on color sliders and the replacements for the spin buttons. Incorperating Tav's spin button widget work on top of Martin's color slider replacement work alongside much improved visual representation of the widgets. Mike wanted to know if he'd covered everything in the new widget needed. Martin suggested inviting in an accessability person in to review the new widget and tell us what kind of accessability is needed. Mikekov and Martin talk about colors, the need for color module colors and what's available in CSS. Color wheels and the way we handle colors per document or per object. Vaibhav worked on text on path UX improvements to add handles to be able to change how the text on path is working on canvas. Exciting work. Ravi has been working on their Google Sumer of Code project the Node based Filter Editor. Nearing completion of the base of the editor, and hoping to have all the basic functionality in terms of usage to be completed by the next two weeks. Skippr has been working on GSoC on the pen tool improvements; they are working with Adam to decide the key bindings for the functionality. The first part was editing nodes during drawing with the pen tool the next part is switching to the node tool while using the pen tool which is more tricky. The team thanks René for his work in ensuring our community is writing good commit messages and is teaching new contributors how to write better commit messages. Ishaan got the rubber bans and select tools all merged, and is now working on the selection ques styles. The styles are controllable in a basic way via a css theme file. He has a question about the thickness of the lines and the difference in handle position on master might need to be fixed. Thanks everyone for comming to this week's meeting. The next one will be July 2nd.

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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: Affinity License for GSoC student
by Jonathan Neuhauser 14 Jun '24

14 Jun '24

Dear board, = Background = My GSoC student is working on .afdesign import and is making very good progress. He’d like to purchase a license for Affinity Designer to continue the work. You probably all got the Adobe news on the weekend, and due to that, there is currently a flash sale. The price in the EU is currently 37€ (50% off). So please vote quickly so we can make use of that. = Vote = A) Authorize reimbursement of Manpreet Singh for an Affinity Designer 2 / Affinity Suite license, up to $100. B) No reimbursement. C) Other: … Best regards Jonathan

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