- Inkscape Board of Directors

Announcement: The Inkscape 1.4 About Screen contest is upon us!
by Maren Hachmann 03 Mar '24

03 Mar '24

For each new version of Inkscape, we invite all Inkscape artists, newcomers and seasoned professionals, to submit an artwork for the "About Screen" contest. The About Screen Contest is about more than the About Screen. Contest artwork is also frequently featured in news articles about the release, on the inkscape.org download page, and in other locations. Each and every submission also helps us test the newest version of Inkscape. The topic for this year's contest is "GROWTH". We're excited to see what great art is submitted this year! We're looking forward to your contributions, to helping spread the message about the contest, and helping us select a winner! Learn more here: https://inkscape.org/community/about-screen-contests/ Your Inkscape Vectors Team

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LGM and "Inkfest"
by tavmjong＠free.fr 29 Feb '24

29 Feb '24

Hi, Please add to tomorrow's agenda: We've talked about having an Inkscape event to be held just before LGM (Thursday, 9th - Sunday, 12th May Rennes, France https://libregraphicsmeeting.org/2024/). I've contacted Cedric (LGM organizer and long-time Inkscape community member) about space and he indicted it wouldn't be a problem. To organize the fest we need to make some decisions: 1. What the event should be called? (Inkfest?) 2. Who do we invite with what level of support? (Developers, Vectors, Translators, Users?) 3. Dates? (Monday 6th through Wednesday 8th?) 4. Budget ($20,000?) At the Bensberg hackfest we had 11 attendees with a budget of $20,000. At the Saarbrucken hackfest we had 13 attendees, of which 10 received Inkscape funding up to $2000 per person. Bensberg hackfest: https://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/Hackfest2023_Bensberg Saarbrucken hackfest page: https://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/Hackfest2019_Saarbr%C3%BCcken 2020 Rennes hackfest page (never finished): https://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/Hackfest2020_Rennes Tav

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Developer Meeting: Feb 25th 2024
by Martin Owens 25 Feb '24

25 Feb '24

Dear Devs, Big thanks to everyone who came to our meeting and all the new faces who came to talk about their work this week with us. Also thanks to everyone who stuck around for 2 HOURS! We got through some deep talk and a bunch of merge requests in our backlog (see below) Meeting: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Attending: Martin, Mansi, Marc, MikeKov, pbs, Rafael, Siddhant Agarwal, Tav, Vaibhav Malik, Ishaan Next Meeting: March 4th 2024 = Website DDOS Situation Martin talked about the DDos attack against the website and reported what happened and what things have been put in place to help bring it back. The website is still being attacked today. (two days) = Gtk4 Work PBS builds a Gtk4 app image and we can get the CI to build it. Currently we use an old ubuntu for app image and a newer ubuntu for other builds. We can actually get over this if we use a new tool introduced for building app images. Philip would like to hand this work onto another developer if we can find someone who's interested in the work. Some bugs fixed in the gtk4 branch. There's some bugs which were fixed in gtk4 branch but not merged into master and he's working on finding them and porting them. = Testing PBS reports that since we upgraded to C++20, the 2geom code coverage isn't working any more. It'll need to be fixed or disabled. = Release Schedules We talked a lot about release schedules, if other teams are seeing our plans and are in sync with us. How hard our deadlines are and why we use strctured releases in our project to help keep things moving and keep contributions going out to users etc. Many more details were covered casually. Vaibhav wanted to talk about test coverage and how we can improve our automated testing. He's also been working on some regressions related to toolbars migration and regressions related to context menu selection logic. = Packaging Marc is working on a complete rework of the debian packaging stuff, separating stuff in multiple packages, no more "inkscape-trunk" incompatibilities, no more "separate branch" with deps. = Color Refactoring PBS, Mikekov and Rafael helped reviewing Martin's large color refactoring merge request and work through some of the issues as well as explaining how it's structured. Martin made a video to explain the outline and the other developers were able to review the various issues and how it needs to be improved going forwards. = Other Work PBS wants to finish the command line bitmap tracing branch for 1.4, somebody made a fork of inkscape and replaced the gui with a command line and someone else then tried backporting that back into inkscape to give us command line bitmap tracing. Mikekov has pushed a bunch of small bug fixes. There are so many things that have changed in 1.4 and there's some concerns that the refactoring will cause instability and we may not have the bug fixing resources. Mansi will be wrapping up revamping of filter gallery with one more mr :) (most of them have been fixed). Apart from them diving deep into rendering of selection tool and trying to figure out the cause of the issue - selection tool corner handles off by a small amount Siddhant wanted to ask about livarot functionality and the lib2geom GSoC and wanted to know what work had already been done. = Group Activity: Merge Request Review We work on our merge requests backlog as there is a large number of merge requests (90!) that need to be either merged or closed. We got through 9 of them today. --------------------------- Best Regards, Martin Owens

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Inkscape lagging
by Finn Downey 08 Feb '24

08 Feb '24

> > > : > > > > > > > > > > > Hello Inkscape. My name is Finn Downey. And I have been using Inkscape to make a drawing but I am having a slight problem. > It seems that the bigger my drawing gets, the slower the website seems to act. I mean whenever I try to move a whole bunch of objects at once, it just moves so slowly. I have tried pretty much everything to get it to work the way it should. I tried using layers and even changing the Gaussian blur quality and filter effect quality to their lowest quality which is said to be the fastest. I have even tried cleaning my computer but nothing seems to work. Do you know what is wrong and if there is anything that can be done to fix these problems? Is there any chance you could even give the program some kind of overhaul so it keeps moving at the right speed no matter how much stuff is on the screen? because I feel that would be really great. > > Thank you kindly! > > > > > > > > > > > > >

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[VOTE] Bugfix accelerator 2024
by Jonathan Neuhauser 03 Feb '24

03 Feb '24

Dear PLC, the developer team requests to repeat the sucessful 2023 Bugfix accelerator program in 2024 with a few upgrades as discussed in last week's developer meeting. Background: see attached document, but to give you a summary of the changes: * No fixed list of contractors at the time of the vote; instead Call for applications like with the GTK4 internal contractor + hiring team. * Scenario of a contractor dropping out is explicitly covered; extension for the 1.4.x release series contained in the proposal. * Clarification that the selection of issues to work on is done primarily by the project. * Simplification of contract section. As for other major expenses from contracting in 2024, my grants proposal is still awaiting SFC review. Ballot: a) Repeat the bugfix accelerator program under the conditions outlined in the proposal; allocate USD 20'000 to it. b) No bugfix accelerator program in 2024. c) Other: ______ Best regards, Jonathan ___________________

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Developer Meeting: Jan 24th 2024
by Martin Owens 24 Jan '24

24 Jan '24

Hey everyone, Attending: Martin, Tav, Mikekov, Krlr17, NPJ, Mansi, Jonathan, Marc, René ------ Mansi - introduced themselves, they are from India and are a computer science and interested to help with Inkscape with the filters. Tav - XML editor rewriting it for Gtk4 compatibility trying to add drag and drop but it's a bit of a nightmare. The code hasn't been touched much in 20 years. There's a couple of different options, and he's going for the tree view. He copied the code from the object dialog, but it turns out the drag and drop wasn't working in the object dialog and it was segfaulting with an asserts. But even fixing those wasn't fixing it. We discussed the details further for ten minutes. Mikekov - Been on vacation but recommends studying the Gtk4 which details all the new concepts and it's going to be important for our developers to learn them and get comfortable with using it properly. Krlr17 - Martin wanted to know how the issues tracker is going, they said they could do with some help. On bug fixing they think a bug accelerator program would greatly help. For the triaging side, we should do a mentorship program where we spend some time getting new people into the project. People on the forum might be a good source of potential candidates. Jonthan - Bug accelerator program, has a draft but is not ready to be submitted. The goal is to have people apply for the position. We talked briefly about the way the new project should be run. We created a poll to ask people who would be interested in joining the hiring committee. Marc and Jonathan said yes. Everyone else abstained. Another poll for who would be interested, and there were people who answered yes (named withheld). A third poll about if we should run the program again came back with a 100% in favor vote that we should do it. Jonathan will set up a PLC vote at the weekend. René - Martin asked about a testing bug on macOS and René will look at it and will be able to run the whole test suite locally to find out what's going on. René is reviewing the mac-statium article and keep in touch with those guys. Also working on Gtk building stuff in general. We talked briefly about rocket chat, matrix and alternative chat, we will continue to have this chat to make sure we're doing the right thing. We're not going to rush into making a change at this time though. Thanks to everyone who came and talked about developer issues. It was a full and fun meeting today. Best Regards, Martin Owens

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Developer Meeting, Jan 8th 2024
by Martin Owens 08 Jan '24

08 Jan '24

Thanks to everyone who came today; Attending: Marc, Jonathan, Martin, René, Tav, James, Mikekov Next Meeting: Tuesday January 16th Calendar: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ # FOSDEM We started by talking about FOSDEM, confirming which days we would be available. We need to book train tickets, Mark will be asking his employer, Martin will be asking pono. # Release Planning We spent the end of the meeting planning out the 1.4 release and what this would look like. We have decided that we will have one more Gtk3 release with fewer features for 2024 to give us extra room to making the Gtk4 release as good as it can be. There will be a refactoring freeze in a about a week and a feature freeze in a couple of months. So if developers have plans for features and fixes, now is the time to focus on getting them into 1.4 The Gtk4 branch merge will be posponed until after the 1.4.x branch split to make this process easier. # Developer topics Marc - Needed to update the windows store version of Inkscape Martin - Working on color refactoring, including a mass of tests and talked about using gtest in advanced ways James - Continuing work on fixing issues with the sp-grid and dealing with older files and making sure we're not corrupting old files too much. Marc and Martin pointed james towards an old archive on openclipart svgs to search for wild data. René - Has been working on the Gtk4 building for windows 7zip and will proceed from there into macOS building. It now compiles thanks to some fixes from pbs. - Additionally, MacStadium will release an article about us we don't know the contents but they've been friendly. - Is thinking about what we will do at LGM in Ren, France. It's not close to much. We talked a bit about the cutural ameinaties of various european towns. Mikekov - Has been working on a path specific element in the object attribute dialog. Designed by adam, It's requiring a refactoring and it'll take a bit of time to complete. - Found a new book for Gtk4 which describes the way the data model works and thinks others should read it too. GTK4 Rust book: https://gtk-rs.org/gtk4-rs/stable/latest/book/ Tav - Fixed a bug with the dash code using the Gtk grid view, the cursor would reset to t he start when editing in that box which made it hard to use. - The Gtk4 work is going slow at the moment. Thanks everybody! Best Regards, Martin Owens

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PLC meeting this Friday
by Ted Gould 03 Jan '24

03 Jan '24

Howdy folks, Hope everyone had a good end of year and are excited about 2024. I'm going to be in the mountains this Friday and I'm guessing that'll include sketchy Internet access (it has in the past, but I'm hopeful it has improved). Can someone else take the lead for the meeting this week? Thank you, Ted

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Request for comments: Inkscape Grants
by Jonathan Neuhauser 11 Dec '23

11 Dec '23

Dear fellow PLC members, I'd like to get our grants program off the ground. After some initial discussion with Pono, targeted donations are off the table for now, which fortunately makes the evaluation process easier and reduces the administrative (intial and runtime) overhead significantly. (And I'm somewhat opposed to them in general by now for that reason). This draft is now very much in line with what Alexandre Prokoudine has researched for the FreeCad Project Association [1], they are also looking into / setting up a grants system. (That's to say my proposal is not an outlier in the FOSS world.) I'm now looking for comments from the PLC, so we can hopefully move this over the finish line with the SFC very soon. This is not a vote, but a request for comments; please send me your feedback whenever you have time. https://office.inkscape.org/nextcloud/index.php/s/65kwEg2DTeLcbKJ Thanks in advance, Jonathan (I know that this depends on the teams policy, and I'm still waiting for SFC feedback on that one too.) [1] https://github.com/FreeCAD/FPA/blob/main/reports/2023_09_27_Prokoudine.md

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FOSDEM Travel Grants
by Jonathan Neuhauser 27 Nov '23

27 Nov '23

Dear all, ==== Background ==== as discussed during yesterday's board meeting, I propose to cover the travel expenses for project members who want to attend fosdem. ==== Travel grants ==== The Inkscape Project is offering travel grants to help Inkscape developers and community members attend FOSDEM 2024 in Brussels, Belgium. Grants are intended to help cover travel expenses and boost the project’s representation at this important conference. * The Inkscape Project will issue grants up to a maximum of USD 500 per person and will spend a maximum of USD 5000 in total. * Any person listed as Inkscape Member on the project website at the time of their application is eligible. * Grants will be issued on a first-come, first-serve basis. * To request a grant, send an email with your estimated travel costs to to the PLC at inkscape(a)sfconservancy.org by (latest!) January 31st, 2023. A decision about the grant will be sent to you shortly after, so you can proceed to book the tickets. * If travel by train is available, train should be used preferably instead of plane; apart from this, the most economic option should be used. * After FOSDEM, submit your travel receipts to and from FOSDEM to the PLC. You will be reimbursed for expenses up to the grant amount you requested, but it might not happen immediately. Please be mindful of other’s financial needs (i.e. don’t request a grant of $500 if your train costs $100) and the project’s resources. We look forward to meeting you in Brussels! ==== What the PLC needs to do ==== For every incoming email, check whether the applicant is a member and there is budget available. If yes, reply that the grant is approved. (If no one else wants, I can handle that.) ==== BALLOT ==== a) Approve the Travel grants program for FOSDEM 2024 as described above, and allocate a total budget of $5000 for it. b) No Travel grants for FOSDEM 2024. c) Other, please elaborate As usual, PLC members should abstain if they plan to request a grant themselves. Best regards Jonathan

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