- Inkscape Board of Directors

Congratulations, Inkscape!
by Maren Hachmann 06 Nov '23

06 Nov '23

Dear Inkscape Contributors, today, the Inkscape project celebrates its 20th anniversary. 20 years ago, it started out as a fork from the sodipodi project, with this email from Bryce: https://web.archive.org/web/20140110200622/https://sourceforge.net/p/sodipo… For this special day, Vectors have given the Community the opportunity to send their messages to you, the contributors. Please find the community's messages to you here: https://inkscape.gitlab.io/inkscape-docs/awesome-web-pages/20th_anniversary/ Happy 20th Anniversary! Maren

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Re: Inkscape: taking over MacStadium
by René de Hesselle 27 Oct '23

27 Oct '23

Hi Patrick, glad to hear from you! :) We noticed that the runner went offline like two weeks ago, but it was certainly not inactive. While we’re shifting CI towards GitLab’s fleet, I’d still put our MacStadium resources to good use. If there are any left, that is :/ If you have any kind of emails or contact info, please send it my way. Because MacStadium’s open source pages can only be found via Google and all their links regarding their open source program are defunct. To me it looks like they have shut it down, there is no way to register at this time. I have already sent them an email about this, but the email address they provided is a very general one and I’m not sure if I’ll ever get a response that way. I hope I can salvage something. Thank you for your time - for now, eMail is sufficient, but I’ll reach out via chat if things get complicated. René > Am 27.10.2023 um 21:44 schrieb Patrick Storz <eduard.braun2(a)gmx.de>: > > Hi René, > > I'm fine, thanks for asking! Hope you're doing fine these days as well! > > I'm more than happy to share the credentials for MacStadium and (if you > can make use of them) the scripts I used to set-up our runner instance. > > I'm afraid however that our server might already have been shut down due > to inactivity (tbh I had assumed the project had long shifted to > something else since I did not hear anything in a long time and > therefore did not make an effort to reach out when MacStadium sent some > mails recently), so maybe the easiest way is to re-register a FOSS account? > > Either way just let me know what you need from my end and I'm happy to > help where I can (by mail is fine, but Chat works too, if you want to > discuss synchronously at some point!) > > Cheers > Patrick > > > Am 22.10.2023 um 13:39 schrieb René de Hesselle: >> Hi Patrick, >> >> I hope you are well! >> >> You are the single point of contact for MacStadium and our Windows runner and >> we need to shift these responsibilities to someone who is more active in the >> project. I hope you understand that this is by no means a personal critique >> but just „business as usual“ that we need to take care of our resources. >> >> I am taking over these responsibilities, so I need the MacStadium contact info >> and credentials from you. With these I’m going to contact MacStadium and inform >> them of the handover and have your personal info exchanged with mine where >> applicable. >> >> I do not have encrypted email, I suggest that you put all the info and credentials >> into a KeePass database (e.g. https://keepassxc.org/) and I’ll provide you my >> mobile number where you can text me the password. >> >> This initial email goes to the board list so people are informed, but do not >> send your reply there (even if password protected, I do not feel comfortable with >> this kind of exchange over a mailing list). >> >> Looking forward to hearing from you, >> >> René

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Inkscape: taking over MacStadium
by René de Hesselle 22 Oct '23

22 Oct '23

Hi Patrick, I hope you are well! You are the single point of contact for MacStadium and our Windows runner and we need to shift these responsibilities to someone who is more active in the project. I hope you understand that this is by no means a personal critique but just „business as usual“ that we need to take care of our resources. I am taking over these responsibilities, so I need the MacStadium contact info and credentials from you. With these I’m going to contact MacStadium and inform them of the handover and have your personal info exchanged with mine where applicable. I do not have encrypted email, I suggest that you put all the info and credentials into a KeePass database (e.g. https://keepassxc.org/) and I’ll provide you my mobile number where you can text me the password. This initial email goes to the board list so people are informed, but do not send your reply there (even if password protected, I do not feel comfortable with this kind of exchange over a mailing list). Looking forward to hearing from you, René

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Developer Meeting Oct 20th 2023
by Martin Owens 20 Oct '23

20 Oct '23

Dear Inkscape Community, Here are the meeting notes from today's developer meeting: Meeting: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Present: S.Ouchene, Martin, Tav, Marc, Krlr17, MikeKov, Jabier, Jonathan, René Next Meeting: October 28th # Gtk4 Tav has been working on the File Fialogs. When investigating the code there appear to be so many classes which at first seem like it's too many, but it's actually a permutation of open, save, windows, gtk. The real problem is the mixed up way they're written. The new Gtk4 dialogs all return Gio::File objects, and we should be using these more within our own code to avoid the conversions between std::string and Glib::ustring. Issues with the filter drop-down, keeping things in sync. Probably get rid of the win32 dialogs. Martin suggests not spending too much time trying to keep functionality which we will probably have to redesign anyway or that would take a ton of work to support. Especially if it involves hacking the Gtk widget tree in the dialog which is prone to errors. # Building and Infrastructure Marc asked Rene why the macstatium runner doesn't any more, it's blocking the 1.3.x branch. Rene wasn't aware of any issues, but to cope with it we can migrate it to the normal windows runners. There are some permissions issues to work out between Rene and Patrick to make sure the machines are accessible by more people as Rene doesn't have access to the machine Checking out CI minutes. We're ok, but cutting it close with the amount of spare minutes. Marc wanted to ask about a specific merge request related to building and CI. A short explanation about windows docker. Although this is probably not available to GitLab, but worth checking out as downloads of depedencies take the longest time in our builds and cutting this part out would be very good. Rene has been working on dependency updates. Looking into Gtk3 and 4 deps. Especially regarding libadwaita which is complicated to build with deps that don't build yet on macOS. Working through the depedency stack, for example cairo has made all their symbols private like poppler. This is worth keeping in mind when we use private symbols. Brief talk about the use of font config and freetype uses in inkscape. Libjpeg-turbo claims to be much faster than regular jpeg library. It's supposed to be compatible and more capable. Rene is interested because jpeg is built really early. Mike says it has asembler instructions for intel and wonders if this would work on macOS. Rene will make a test to try it out. # Next Version (1.3) Martin talked about his 1.3.x backporting work, some basic requests for how to tag merge requests for the backport and the target dates. All work should be completed by the end of the month giving people enough time to test 1.3.1rc1 (or similar). Jabier has finished helping with the fixes for LPE crashes and offers to help with the backporting process. But he has some worries about possible regressions from his fixes in the LPE code and asks for help testing the LPEs. Marc provides a crash issue and asks about if it's fixed. # Color Refactoring Martin has been working on doing the color refactoring. There are two main ideas, the first is to make sure colors that use profiles are tied to their profiles using a URIHandler, so we can see what objects are in use and clean them up. We can also use this to make a list of used colors for the palettes. The second is to support different spaces and not convert everything to sRGB in order to store the numbers in our code. An icc profile is not required to specify a different color space, and we should be able to output css4 like colors (for example hsl(...)) Marc shared an older merge request with his work on refactoring and Martin said this would be useful to compare it all. Mike asked for a location for color profiles and we talked breifly about color profile data. # Other Business Mikekov has been helping with merge requests. Jonthan has been waiting on feedback for the grants proposal. We'll be meeting with pono on Monday after a two week gap in SFC meetings for various things. Big thanks to everyone who came to today's meeting. You don't have to dress up to attend next week's developer meeting. It's a Saturday and attendance is lower, so we might just have a social or may just talk about 1.3, depending on the crowd. Best Regards, Martin Owens

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VOTE: Contract extension for dboles
by Jonathan Neuhauser 06 Oct '23

06 Oct '23

Dear PLC, this is a vote to extend Daniel Boles' contract for another two months (320 hours) and allocate additional budget at the request of the development team. Background: - Daniel was originally hired for the GTK4 migration. This is making good progress: as of now, the development team estimates that a first version of Inkscape that builds with GTK4 will be available around the time his current contract ends. - By all accounts, the progress has been very steady, also including general code cleanups which however did not distract him from his main task. We were impressed by his knowledge, speed, and contribution quality. By now, Daniel has 174 MRs merged. - However, there are will be no more hours to spend for debugging, fixing regressions, and upstream bugs. Daniel now has in-depth knowledge of Inkscape's codebase as well as his GTK4 expertise. He would be a very valuable asset going forward, so we feel it would be great to have him available for some additional time. - He has expressed interest to take on a permanent position somewhere and in that case would finish the contract part-time. This might be an even better deal for us, as he can take on a "consultant / technical support" role, on an as-needed basis, e.g. fixing difficult bugs and helping other contributors to move their work to GTK4. This is possible under the terms of his (current) contract: it allows to submit invoices over the course of a year, for a total of 320 hours. The same model would apply to the extension of his contract. - If he - which we currently don't expect - runs out of work related to GTK4, there's enough other technical debt that he can work on. Ballot: a) Extend Daniel Boles' contract for another two months (320 hours) under the same conditions as his previous contracts; the work items will be (ordered by priority, as time permits) - finishing the GTK4 migration, - fix regressions in the GTK4 build of Inkscape, including upstream work, - assist other contributors in updating their work for GTK4 if requested, - work on other technical debt in the Inkscape codebase and allocate $16,000 for his compensation. b) Don't extend Daniel Boles' contract. c) Other: ______ Best regards, Jonathan

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Meeting notes; October 4th 2023
by Martin Owens 04 Oct '23

04 Oct '23

Hey Everyone, Thanks to those who were able to make today's develop meeting Attending: Alezzacreative, Jonathan, Marc, Martin, Krlr17, Ishaan, Tav Calendar: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Next Meeting: 12th October 2023 # FOSSSDem FOSSDem call for dev rooms. We need to decide if we're going to team up with another project, the room is mostly focused on presentation and on technical and development side. So we expect technical presentations and would need to be able to fill the room for at least half a day. Martin asked Marc to head up organing the effort so we have a main person who can act as the driver and ask other projects. # Packaging Marc has some packaging stuff to take care of for Linux; a bunch of issues to look at in the coming week. Martin wanted to know about the backports task, Jonathan suggested to do the testing for each of the issues to make sure it's all working. One month to go before the release and is still the plan, Martin will tell vectors so they have time. Krlr17 reports that the windows builds are not available on the website currently. Marc knows about the issue. # Grant Prooposal Jonathan reports back his meeting with pono about the grants funding project; he has found that we wouldn't ever be able to a hybrid system of allowing users to donate towards specific projects. But without that part of the proposal it would still be possible to attract donations for the global fund. # Gtk4 Migration Tav has been doing more Gtk4 stuff, trying to deal with some filename issues. It's much more particular about conversing std string and Glib::ustring classes. It's a bit tough as it's a windows specific issue because filenames are stored on windows as UTF16 but UTF8 on linux and mac. Tav is working on a script to make Images Gtk4 compatible. Daniel has been progressing on small items, still working on both his Gtk4 branch and bringing things into master when they can be. We reviewed the Gtk4 contract progress, the amount of money we're spending down and the type of work being done within the terms of the contract. Martin has talked about the merge conflicts that are happening, mostly he's holding onto large feature merge requests. Other developers might be waiting for the Gtk4 work to complete before developing new things. # Color Management System Martin gave a talk about his CMS work, the user interface, color picking the kinds of assumptions and workflows. And how to use color seperation. Other developers were very helpful in confirming if these designs and approaches are correct. Thanks for reading! Best Regards, Martin Owens

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Monthly PLC Meeting Oct 6th
by Ted Gould 03 Oct '23

03 Oct '23

Howdy, We have our monthly PLC status meeting this week at the regular time. Friday Oct 6th at 10am PST. Unfortunately I'm going to be traveling out to see my son, and our schedule is up in the air, so I'm not sure I can lead it. Is there someone who could lead the meeting in my absence? Thank you, Ted

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Developer Meeting Notes - Sept 18th 2023
by doctormo＠gmail.com 19 Sep '23

19 Sep '23

Dear Developers, Thanks to everyone who came to this week's meeting. Attending: Marc, Martin, René, S.Ourchene, Tav, Jabier, Ishaan, Amenzou Meeting: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Next Date: Tuesday September 26th, 2023 Portable Apps wish for us to distribute the windows64/32 build for Inkscape 1.3. The releases policy we talked about and seems reasonable is to offer trust to fellow members who are working within the project who document the scripts and process for how the release is put together. An email has been sent back to invite them to particpate more closely and document their work. Everyone took turns to ask Tav questions about text. It's ask Tav day! Some looking at merge requests and issues, one about how to process text in the layout. Tav worked on the toolbar Gtk4 work and researching all the items that are needing for all the new widget allocations. Marc wants the toolbar work to use a merge commit, instead of squashing the commit. Tav and Rene wants to do this work collectively at the next developer meeting. Ishaan has continued working on the updates for the website. Working through each of the possible breaking changes progressively in a private branch. Rene wanted to know when 1.3.1 might be released, Martin says he's expecting November time, Marc says we need to commit all our backports which is a task for Martin in the coming weeks. Jabier has a MR that is ready to be reviwed. 5763, it needs feedback from adam. Martin has been working on CMS improvements with a UI improvement merge request which is being reviewed by designers mostly. Good feedback about the process of desktop preference profiles vs. document profiles and future work needed on color pickers. Tav has some concerns that we wouldn't be able to build AppImages with Gtk4. Marc says that there are ways around the restrictions, but we may have to ask for some backports upstream to help us with the process. See you all next week! Best Regards, Martin Owens

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Developer Meeting - Sept 10th 2023
by Martin Owens 10 Sep '23

10 Sep '23

Dear Devs, Thanks to everyone who came to today's developer meeting. Attending: Martin, Jonathan, Tav, Hendrick, Hash, Ishaan, Jabiertxo, PBS Calendar: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Next meeting: Monday, September 18th # Extensions Jonathan has been completing his speed and API improvements to the extensions style based API. Martin has continued work on the CMYK PDF Exporter, is planning on producing a CMYK JPEG and TIFF exporter as part of the work needed for that, but it should provide extra functionality outside of the PDF work. It may need more packaging work for the binary Python Image Library or another color management library support, will know more in the coming weeks. # Improvements Hendrick - Second time in this meeting, really interesting starting work on Inkscape and like last time he's focusing on the maths side for offsetting paths. If one thinks about it from the maths side instead of the code side he sees a lot of room for improvement. In a process of discovery and keeping some attention on performance. Lib2Geom is quite nice because it's quite fast and they can be used for the pure maths construction. For example a cubic bezier curve it only checks a couple of points to test how good the approximations are and we can do better. Jabier worked on an improvement to the spray tool. Martin has a question about backporting tool improvements after all the event refactoring for Gtk4. Special merge requests will be needed and tested for each instance. # Gtk4 Work Tav and PBS has been working on Gtk4 stuff, getting very close to working on Gtk4 directly. The big project currently in the toolbar work. There are a couple of bugs with a couple of widgets which change size or that cause the window to change size when you change tools. But it's usable so we can merge it in sooner. PBS has been working on Gtk4 branch, we should keep to using a public shared branch to reduce the duplicate work if we're working from private branches. # Infrastructure Jonathan has been working on the paid projects work with pono and Martin, a small confusion has pono talk to Karen before we were finished drafting and he got the wrong idea of the proposal. We need to be clearer where in the process we are during drafting. We need to move to C++20 and use the CI builder to know if some feature is available in the build system. AppImage targets Ubuntu 20.04, Martin suggests using a PPA to install new Gnu tools, but Marc wasn't available so we don't know what the real limitations are. Ishaan has been working on improving the website to a new Django version. Wanted to know what kind of policy we should have for upgrading libraries when they are deprecated. Best Regards, Martin Owens

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Developer Meeting Notes - July 24 2023
by doctormo＠geek-2.com 24 Jul '23

24 Jul '23

Hey Everyone, Thanks to everyone who came to the developer meeting this week. Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Present: Rafael, Marc, Martin, Thomas Holder, Mikekov, Gre, Nicco, Rene, Jonathan Next Meeting: Tuesday, August 1st 2023 (1 hour after the SFC catch up meeting) # New Stable Release Congratulations everyone for the release. We've had about 25k downloads today. The responses in all the social media and news sites has been very positive so far. We're all very happy with the release, although we understand there are still some rough patches. Martin wants to say that he’s very proud of being able to work with everyone this last year and hopes everyone knows how much they rock. Request for the website developer: Add all the download numbers together from the releases into the download page. Maybe cache the number so it's not so over requesting. This time we made the RC and final installers days before the final release date so we have a lot more buffer than usual and could fix issues with the msi build without too much stress. Even the windows store creator didn't crash this time. So this year’s release went much smoother. Marc - Made the windows installers signed, self-signed so they still get a warning about trust. But the notice dialog will now say it's by "Inkscape" which is slightly better than "Unknown" # Ongoing Fixes The 1.3.x branch is unfrozen, so please apply fixes and things which you can apply to the 1.3, including backports which couldn't be applied to 1.3 in time. Don't spend too much time making features which can only apply to 1.3 even if we have some disruption with 1.4's Gtk4 migration. Rene wanted to ask that we keep 1.3.x issues tagged properly so Martin can work on them with his bug fixing contract. # Other Developments Nicco has been working on the AI contract extension. He's been working on live path effects for rectangles which works quite nice. He'll be working on styles next, gradients and other elements. Jonathan has been unavailable because of parental leave. Rafael has started looking at some problems in lib2geom, specifically to do with arcs, there was a good implementation which didn't have all the cases covered. We've worked on stabilizing the numerical stability of the current methods, but we're reaching the end of what can be done with these methods. There are some new mathematics which use a degree four polynomial the basis of which has been added already. This is all to fix the intersections of two ellipse/arcs. Rafael we may add a rotate box in the select tool. Marc has some concerns that it might be cluttering. Martin suggests that a configurable toolbar would allow non-default features which could be switched on. Although some users think this is essential, Marc thinks they could use the transform dialog instead. Thomas has joined us to congratulate us for the new release. He was trying out some new features and hit some limitations so has coded it. Martin hasn't been available because of a bereavement; wants to thank everyone for covering him while he’s been away. Has made a poll for his sponsors what they want him to work on for the coming year. He'll be focusing on CapyPDF for CMYK PDF output and the secondary project will be the connectors tool which has been waiting for a while. Jonathan joins us to congratulate us on a great release. # Gtk4 No one was available to talk about Gtk4 this week. # Infrastructure Marc reported our CI builder minutes usage on GitLab skyrocketed. There is some discussion about the possible future CI configurations, running them ourselves etc. Intel machines for macOS, Linux machines, etc. Rene reports that the Gnome project is having isolation problems in their CI builder but they don't have anyone to look after the machine. Rene has concerns that the Gnome project isn't committed to macOS and might not be trustworthy. So even though he could spend time helping Gnome, he fears it might be a waste of his volunteer time. There may be some interpersonal or cultural issues that need to be unpicked. Marin suggested we need to get together with the Gnome project and try and talk it out. He's got an open ticket so they can use his macOS CI runner for glib. # Events We have some interest in tracking FOSSDEM and LGM events. And seeing if we can run a dev room, or a booth or what might be possible. Lots of interesting topics for a dev room. Editable SVG, Gtk4, and other cross-project collaboration. Awesome meeting everyone. Lots talked about. See you all next week. Best Regards, Martin Owens

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