- Inkscape Board of Directors

Developer Meeting Notes: May 21st 2023
by Martin Owens 21 May '23

21 May '23

Dear developer team, It was a quiete Sunday meeting today, here are your notes: Meetings: Sunday 21st May 2023 Next Meeting: Monday 29th May 2023 René, Tav, Mikekov, Martin, Jonathan, Nicco Week was eventful for René because GitLab announced their Arm builders are now available but also announced that they are decomissioning their intel runners within two weeks at the end of May. René had to run around to patch together a way keep our CI builders working. Various movements of machines had to be planned or re-planned because of this short notice from GitLab. We're having problems getting responses from Pono and the SFC for various issues. Tav hasn't heard back about the Gtk4 contract, a PLC candidate didn't hear back when they had questions about standing for the PLC election, Jonathan hasn't heard back in two weeks about questions he has regarding the bug accelorator program. To help figure out what's going on, Jonathan is going to try and talk with Pono after the hiring committee meeting later in the week. Tav worked on some demonstration code for multi column dropdowns and generally looking into the Gtk4 migration more. Mikekov looked into translations and is worried about the systems for polish translations and the quality of code reviews. Developers are struggling with the review of these requests. Martin suggests the po directory should be split out into it's own git submodule for portability, Jonathan suggests using special folder ownership to indicate which teams in inkscape can approve changes, Mikekov explores some tooling and what might have gone wrong in the past for the polish translations. Recommended that this conversation be moved to the translators mailing list so that team can make the decisions about what it wants to do. Jonathan has been doing some assumption checking in the AI importer project. Adobe has managed to create filters which in svg are three lines, but in ai files take a hundred lines. Nicco has been working on units and scaling and has written a lot of tests. Slow but stead progress. Chris Rogers is at Wilber Week, please let him know if you have any questions. Marc may be joining him but we don't know if he's going yet. There will be a beta branching event this week, 23rd May, if Marc is available. We need to follow up with the plans for the week. This isn't a beta /release/ as that can happen after. Any open merge requests will have to be duplicated in order to make it into 1.3 after this date. Jonathan has been looking into a contract extension for the bug accelerator project. Originally for three people, reduce to two. Rafael dropped out. Martin has been doing amazing work and we could do with more of his time to work on these issues. The issue will be raised with PLC members. Martin has been working on PDF importers and fixing various regressions. Adding more tests to make it harder to break various complex files. The developer team group activity this week was looking into a few old and new merge requests. Some MRs were approved, some older MRs which were still WIP were closed. Thanks for coming everyone, see you all Monday after next. Best Regards, Martin Owens

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Developer Team Meeting Notes - May 13th 2023
by Martin Owens 13 May '23

13 May '23

Date: Saturday, May 13th 2023 Present: René, Martin, PBS, Jonathan (presiding) Apologies: Tav We started talking about the live previewing functionality for the font tool and how the display and canvas items stacks might be modified to support displaying previews without changing the entire document. Extensions already have a live preview and use a whole new document which is fed in from the extension run. A document copy can be expensive, but might be the cheapest way to do it. The alternative is to create a kind of shadow item which would be tightly controlled by C++ destructors and modifier signals. But that was just an idea. Mikekov's font improvements branch is available for review. It contains a lot of nice improvements, but it looks a bit large. Jonathan is working with Nicco on the AI exporter. The rewrite is nearly complete and Nicco has been able to work 10-15 hours a week on it. The code structure is better and it's a lot faster, maybe an order of magnitude. Making good progress, we'll have to see as we get to the end of the project and then Jonathan will make a presentation for everyone. Gtk contracts; Tav was the only internal application and so he's been selected by us. It's with the SFC now, although no response from pono these past few weeks. We now have three applications for the Gtk4 external contractor. Details of who and what are withheld not to bias anyone's decision. PLC elections are coming up soon. There are 2 confirmed candidates and one person is still deciding. There's very few days left to put your name forwards! Please also review membership requests as soon as possible. Martin needs his merge requests approved. Paint order one is important since it contains tests to be used in another merge request. Jonathan was able to approve it before the end of the meeting. Martin changed the dev graphics for the windows builds. Mostly these won't ever be used, but it's better to have branch specific versions instead of the old 1.0 graphics in the branch. Jonathan highlighted a number of regressions and crashes in the PDF importer. Encouraged to tag them and push their priority up as crashes and regressions are top priority. PBS worked on the shape builder (well done!) and has now been working on the lib2geom problems. He's trying to read the entire mailing list archive for the whole lib2geom project as well as livarot and learn how it works, why it works, and getting in the head space of the people who were involved in building these libraries. He says working on some bugs is tricky but they need some more work to complete. But he has made a fork/branch which turns inkscape into a lib2geom toy which shows all the computational shapes and can show the output at each step. There's calculations for the geometric graph and there's parts of it that become out of sync he speculates. Visualiser branch is available here: https://gitlab.com/pbs3141/inkscape/-/commits/flattening-visualiser He's also thinking about caching in Inkscape. Seeing if caching is actually slowing us down and often turning off cache can actually speed things up. The problem is how often we don't use the cache, but spend time making the cache. He wants to look into ways of fixing it properly. Requesting feedback for these items. René discussed spellchecking with Moini and polygon. There's a lot of confusion about how the spellchecker is supposed to work on macOS. In Linux it's easy you just ask the os for one of the available spell checkers. macOS is baked in. But on windows there's a problem because we a building it with Aspell and there are no pre-built dictionaries which people can install themselves, they have to be compiled. We could ship Hunspell instead, and we can depend on what LibreOffice is doing and it downloads the available system. There's an issue in inbox which Maren created as a summary. René is encouraged to make a non-inbox issue and we can ask some people to help fix it since it's windows based. This is a sort meeting this week. The developer team activity was: Go outside and have a nice walk (when the sun comes up for those on the other side of the planet) See you all next week. Sunday May 21st, same time, same place. Best Regards, Martin Owens

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Re: Vote: Wilber Week
by Martin Owens 10 May '23

10 May '23

Hey everyone, Reminder for everyone to get their votes in on this one please. Let me know if there's any questions too. Below is Tav's vote he sent directly to me by accident. Tav can you resend to the list for confirmation? Martin, On Fri, 2023-05-05 at 19:38 +0200, tavmjong(a)free.fr wrote: > > I vote 1a and 2a. > > > ----- Original Message ----- > > From: "Martin Owens" <doctormo(a)geek-2.com> > > To: "Inkscape Board" <inkscape-board(a)lists.inkscape.org> > > Sent: Friday, May 5, 2023 6:53:57 PM > > Subject: [Inkscape-board] Vote: Wilber Week > > > > Dear PLC, > > > > The Gimp project has invited us to participate in their Wilber > > Week¹ > > at > > the Blender HQ in Amsterdam. The main subject they'd like to talk > > to > > us > > about is coordination between free software graphics tools. This > > might > > be useful to us since we haven't had any Libre Graphics events for > > a > > number of years. > > > > Various people who are invested in this topic were asked if they > > could > > and if they wanted to go². Marc and Chris Rogers were interested. > > Marc > > is organising himself and needs no extra funding, but Chris would > > like > > the travel expenses and some per-diem for the trip. Chris uses all > > of > > these tools in a professional capacity is is very aware of the > > challenges of coordinating them, making him a good candidate. > > > > I've split these into two votes: > > > > [1: Travel Expenses for Chris] > > > > (a) Allocate $260 for travel expenses > > (b) Do not allocate > > > > [2: Per-diem Expenses for Chris and/or Marc] > > > > (a) Allocate SFC's normal per-diem amount³ > > (b) Do not allocate > > (c) Something else > > > > Thanks everyone. > > > > Best Regards, Martin Owens > > > > ¹ Wilber week url is private, please request url for their internal > > frama pad notes on the event if you need it > > ² I was originally asked to go, but it's way too expensive to fly > > from > > the USA so I deferred to other members who are physically closer. > > ³ SFC Travel policy > > https://sfconservancy.org/projects/policies/conservancy-travel-policy.html > > _______________________________________________ > > Inkscape Board of Directors mailing list -- > > inkscape-board(a)lists.inkscape.org > > To unsubscribe send an email to > > inkscape-board-leave(a)lists.inkscape.org > >

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Developer Meeting Notes, 5th May 2023
by Martin Owens 05 May '23

05 May '23

Dear Developers, Here are this week's meeting notes. This week was a bit lighter because the meeting happened at the same time as the PLC updates meeting. Attending: Tav, Martn, Marc, René Jonathan, Jabier, Nicco, Mikekov, James Next Meeting: 13th May 2023 Calendar: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ # Beta schedule There are a few high priority issues left to fix. A particular concern is the slowdown in start times on windows which is the only blocker left. The release seems really solid otherwise and no large issues remain. We have decided to put together a Beta release for the 23rd May when Marc is at the Wilber week and available to dedicate time to it. Jonathan wants an earlier beta fork so the Gtm4 migration can start as soon as possible and break master for that work. Briefly looked at the font collections issues and seeing if there's problems we have to pay attention to. Are we getting all the issues that we want fixed tagged for the 1.3 milestone? Notice to all developers to make sure you tag issues that you think ort to be fixed for the release. # Gtk4 Project Updates for the Gtk4 work happened in the PLC meeting, but basically there's two applicants so far. Though other jobs we've posted have more applicants towards the end of the period. # GitLab Infrastructure Gitlab is updating and everyone should have seen the various warnings. René has looked through the changes and confirmed nothing effects us. The CI builder for macOS was transitioned to GitLab's own machines, it's going to cost credits so we should keep an eye on that as it comes out of beta. It's slower too. There's some oddities in how the test builds works on gitlab it has to rebuild everything each time, so it's caching isn't as good. # Shape Builder PBS, Rafael and Martin have been working to fix shape builder issues. PBS has been leading the charge on the geometry problems. Martin has a shape builder templates addition which Jonathan thinks should depend on how well the feature works after the fixes. Otherwise we risk exposing those issues which are fairly bad. # Other work New fix for the object to path which preserves the paint order when converting. MR looks good but Documentation will need to be up to date for the object to path behaviour changes. Marc has been busy with his work, so wasn't working on inkscape this week. René has been working on the upsteam depedencies, fixes have been accepted upstream without any testing and this is a worry. This is just as true for library updates. Will keep us informed. Nicco and Jonathan have worked on the newer faster AI parser. Which works well. Completely parsed a whole document without any unknown lines in the AI file. Next is to create an inkscape logo and import that. Payment is recieved, so there's no issues so far. Mikekov, working on the object picker for 1.4, working well and thanks Martin for the code review which has fixed. # Bug Accelerator Project The program is going well, see burndown charts on GitLab. We talked briefly about what to do about Rafael bowing out and if he should be replaced at this late stage. We also looked at the rate of fixes and hours used for Martin. Martin recused himself of talking about what to do, but Jonathan wants to talk to pono about possibly moving some of the hours around because of the extended release schedule leaves us with a gap in bug fixing coverage at the very end of the release cycle. See you all next Saturday. Best Regards, Martin Owens

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Developers Meeting, April 27th 2023
by Martin Owens 27 Apr '23

27 Apr '23

Dear Developers, This week's meeting notes are here. Next Developer Meeting in May 8th https://inkscape.org/cals/1/ Attending: MikeKov, Nicco, René, Jonathan, Martin, Vansh Uppa, Rafael, Tav Apologies: Marc René updated the build pipeline for macOS, mostly small cleanups which open us up to back-porting Ventura support to 1.2.x the target is this weekend and we can be finally done with the venture issue. Working on more automation to improve release procedures, upgrade openssl which is a little old now. Looking into contributing to the Gtk osx upstream. Jonathan has been doing preparatory work for importers, checking files are rendered correctly. Helping with the object structure importer. Dividing up the work. A single person so far in the Gtk external position, the prospect is an experienced gtkmm programmer. No one has yet applied for the internal position, the deadline is Sunday. Developers were all reminded of the deadlines. Martin recorded a user-session (a session where an Inkscape user and developer explore new functionality and locate bugs together). Also collected issues from his direct sponsors, this week Martin has been working through these lists of issues. Most are small fixes but some larger works including fixing a much needed Font Toolbar problem and import and export issues. Some are refactoring for 1.3.1 but others are scheduled for 1.3. Not many issues for the Accelerator Program this week as that wasn't a focus. Grid properties issues were worked on by Mikekov and Martin. Grids work to fix all the issues, happy with the refactoring overall, but even though users won't see any benefit, it's a good change under the hood. A refactoring branch is schedule for 1.3.1 Mikekov also has been cleaning up runtime warnings. Rafael has been helping out with various merge requests and bugs. He's dropping out of the bug accelerator program because he's feeling it's more pressure than expected and more like a job. He suggested perhaps a bug bounty program would be more casual and more comfortable for him. Jonathan thanked Rafael for his involvement and his feedback. Giving contractors the right information about how /working/ for Inkscape is different than volunteering should be included in future programs. Tav worked on the color management refactoring. There's a color profile element, which is a bit of a catch all and contains too much functionality so it will need to be progressively cleaned out over time. The developer shad a discussion about the differences between Display, Device and element icc profiles and what functionality is intended by each. More research is needed. Jonathan is interested in hosting a smaller, possibly European centric developer meet-up in the Autumn. Five people in the developer meeting indicated their interest. It would all depend on scheduling and booking places to stay. The Gimp project is hosting an event in May; Martin received an invitation to participate and talk about the integration potential between Blender, Gimp and Inkscape. The event is being hosted at the Blender HQ in Amsterdam. The invites have been forwarded to Marc and Chris R. as the people who are both physically close and with the most experience with the topic. Only travel funding would be required from our side as the Gimp project have hired a boat to stay in. ---- This weeks group activity was reviewing a merge request by Vansh Uppa, where Martin and Mikekov had a difference of opinion about interface design principles and a discussion was had about the best was of designing functionality so that it both safe, less disruptive and consistant. Rafael kindly offered to act as a tie breaker and review the merge request after both Martin and Mikekov defended and explained their positions. ----- Best Regards, Martin Owens

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Developer Meeting Notes: 19th April 2023
by Martin Owens 19 Apr '23

19 Apr '23

Time for another meeting, big thanks to everyone who was able to make it today. Present: Martin, René, Jonathan, Mikekov, Nicco, Tav, Marc Next Meeting: Thursday 19th April 2023 Calendar: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ # Outreach The developer team would like to thank the tireless work of the vectors team; Tav asked is there a way we can do something for them? Martin suggested that we have mentioned in the past funding some food and drink for online events and the vectors team does like to do a release party event. Perhaps that's a good way to say thank you. Will need to reach out. There was a question about how to keep the alpha release on the website front page. We didn't know what the vectors team wanted to do, but the developer team didn't ask for anything specific. Though some developers were not even sure if we had released the alpha as they looked at the front page of the website for news. Nicco added a simple news article, we should make sure this is formatted ok with the people that update the news regularly. # macOS Not much happening with macOS dependencies, but the most important future task is migrating the build system from 1.3alpha to 1.2.2 but René is quite busy with real life at the moment. Was able to test a few things like the fonts and the tests. There was a question of macOS supports variable font support. It should be there if it's there in Linux, but we're not sure, it will need research to know if that's true. We do know that halfbuzz is not upgraded on macOS, so we may have to help fix the issues. We know that everyone uses halfbuzz for text rendering these days. Martin reported a problem with macOS tests on the CI builder related to fonts. Wrote a new svg file to test functions but it's 1.5% wrong and that doesn't pass the 1% fuzziness. May increase the padding to reduce the fuzzy problems. René did recieve the funding for the Apple building machine and now he would like a hardware policy to help make it easier to fund hardware for developers. He will ask various people for information and get back to use for it. # Font Refreshing Martin asked about including the font refresh merge request in 1.3. The consensus was that this is a new feature and most developers haven't seen this feature in other programs. But some programmers did express sympathy with users that this is a long standing issue in Inkscape but ask everyone to bare with us. Each operating system will need it's own implementation. There's two main issues one is the signal from the operating system that fonts have changed at all, and the second is asking pango/fontconfig to refresh it's font context. We know that these are not always available in macOS and Windows and so we may have to fix things upstream in order to enable them. # Windows Builds for Testers We have a conflict between the size of the zip files and the difficult to use 7z file format which requires the use of an external tool. The dev team concluded in a poll that we should move to zip files for the CI builds. This doesn't effect any releases, not even alpha/beta etc, only the merge request CI builds. We tested in the meeting with a screenshare and showed that windows will warn users to extract the files, running the main file will fail without extracting. The files still need extracting. Some other alternatives were proposed such as CAB and Portable Exe. Zip seems like the easiest to implement so Marc has added it as a task. # XML with Line feeds in Attributes Martin has a merge request to 1. write out xml files with any line feeds correctly translated to xml escaped chars and 2. To allow users to more directly add these in the xml editor using Shift+Return. There was no objection to the former, but the later needed some discussion. We concluded that since you can already add these lines using copy and paste, there wasn't anything to be gained by blocking a merge request with such a small risk profile. # AI Importer Nicco continues work on ai importer and rectangles and the new parser for speed. There's thoughts about how to reuse the work and package things with some forethought. Jonathan says they've been working on speed because the difference is so stark. How should the parsing and writing be structured? Reading through the file in a defined manner is the goal. # Gtk Hiring Jonathan reports that the current status is the job posting is out and people are being contacted by pono. One business contacted directly has an interested party who works on gtkmm and would quit his job and do the work, but he would need extra time to give notice and this might for example make some delay for the project's start. It's good news that there are people who are qualified and are available to work on this important project. We should be clear and careful about helping people who are not used to being contractors and offer guidance to anyone who ends up working with us. # Other work Tav wants to work on Display ICC (color) profiles which we need to look at because of the Gtk4 work. In the rendering of the canvas there's a step which applies a given icc profile. This depends on the screen/seat properties in Gdk/Gtk. Researching what's there and what might be needed is ongoing work. Some of this is code cleanup which will help going forwards. More to report next week. Mikekov is working on the item picker. Pono and Martin ran a test on the website to run an election as a trial run for the up and coming PLC election, it went well. Email issues were fixed. It's now waiting for pono to create the main election event. Martin did an run down of the new font collections functionality with a user, and may make a video of it from the big blue button recording. # Google Summer of Code (GSoc) Marc, we are missing a mentor for GSoC, 4 people who can be selected. 3 can be selected. Would Mikekov be available to help with a particular project? The specific subjects are withheld from the notes to not leak which projects are being selected before the time. The meeting was running late and we didn't get to any activities this week.

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Developer Meeting Notes, April 11th 2023
by Martin Owens 13 Apr '23

13 Apr '23

Dear developers, Apologies for the lateness of these notes. Present: NPJ, Martin, Mikekov, René, Tav, Nicco, Marc, Jonathan Next Dev Meeting: Wed 19th April 2023 # About Screen About screen contest winner. General talk about the process, the winner, the runners up and the vote. René asked for the svg to use in the macOS release and we pointed him to the vectors channel. The vector's team social media version with text is really nice. # Alpha Alpha appears to be going well. People are reporting bugs using the alpha, but nothing critical has cropped out giving us hope it's a solid release. Martin completed his ALPHA TESTER video, which was shared through big blue button. It's a silly video but people have responded well to it. René, sorry for missing a few meetings. Nothing to report, alpha looks good on macOS. For reasons unknown the builder has some issues and needed to be rewritten in time for the alpha and René worked over time. Dev team thanked him for the extra effort pushing that through on a deadline. # General Work Martin has been working on a text fix for PDF output which he'd like Tav to review. It's reordering how text is rendered to cairo so strokes apear behind fills when needed. NPJ has been playing with the clang optimizations. Using a large export to test the results, using htop and watching the cpu and gpu. Mikekov, not much progress. Looking for things to do, Martin suggests working on the PDF linking user interface. # Gtk4 Research Tav has done a search for Gtkmm experts and exchanged emails with the main person at Gtkmm who does want to leave maintence, which we already knew. Finding an expert to work on it might be hard. Tav also looked in past Gtkmm contributors for names, some people might be contactable and looked at wikipedia to find people and programs that use Gtkmm or have upgraded to Gtk4. GNote is the only app that's Gtkmm and Gtk4 so far. Martin asked if we can find someone in Gtk main. Possibly. Someone asked how easy is maintaining Gtkmm, can it be automatically generated? Marc says if there is a rust version, which isn't far away from C++ Notice: Hiring team meeting on Thursday! # AI Importer Nicco, planning on implementing more features. Working on shapes. Reporting to a blog wasn't known at the start of the contract and so we're learning along the way. Open a requirements issue to describe what the targets are. The next month may be a bit slower. Bendchmark files are the guide for how much of the format we've supported so far. Jonathan has done more reverse engineering. Mostly text. There's some really interesting path interpriatation that AI must be doing with the data for backwards compatability since changing the lowest data on say a rectangles rounded corner doesn't change anything, but changing it's path does. Even if it has matricies applied to the path. Must be pretty fancy. # Activities We processed three merge requests and reviewed the memberships list for developers. Thanks everyone!

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Teams policy -- DRAFT v0.1
by Ted Gould 07 Apr '23

07 Apr '23

Howdy, We discussed at the hackfest that we wanted to have something to make official teams. But we wanted it to be light and mostly a simple process. In that vein I passed around some ideas to a few folks as they were leaving, but we didn't get much a chance to discuss it. And I realized I hadn't posted to a wider audience. Eventually, I think we should vote on this (or something like it) as an official policy, but right now I'm trying to gather ideas. (unless everyone thinks it is perfect and we should JUST DO IT) https://office.inkscape.org/nextcloud/index.php/s/LQJqfCMRr27xpJb I can't figure out how in Nextcloud to just enable comments? So I shared read-only and folks just reply here? Not sure the best way to discuss. Ted

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Election of Election proctor
by tavmjong＠free.fr 05 Apr '23

05 Apr '23

Dear PLC, Your vote is require to elect an Election Proctor: Select one. (a) Elect Daniel Pono Takamori as Election Proctor. (b) Elect another person to be Election Proctor. Background: From our election procedure: "The Inkscape Board elects by majority vote an Election Proctor who will run a given election and ensure it’s successful completion. The Election Proctor has the responsibility for ensuring the voting is done according to procedure, assuring that the Vote is accurately tallied, and announcing the finalized result of the Vote." Pono volunteered to be the Election Proctor during the Bensberg hackfest.

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GTK4 migration proposal
by Jonathan Neuhauser 05 Apr '23

05 Apr '23

Dear PLC members, in the recent developer meetings, the dev team has formulated a plan to get the GTK4 migration done. This migration is essential for Inkscape, central to our infrastructure, needs to be done quickly (to reduce blockage of other work) and soon. For this reason, we propose hiring an external contractor, a senior developer with expert knowledge on GTK, for a duration of 4 months. I've attached the proposal for that, feedback is welcome. We're planning to start the vote soon, probably on Friday, since a lot of the discussions have already happened at the hackfest. Best regards, Jonathan

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