Hey everyone,
Big thanks to the large number of people who were able to come to this week's meeting. We went long again because of how many great conversations we had about all sorts of things you can read below.
Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Attending: Martin, Tav, Mikekov, Adam, René, ScislaC, skippr, Vaibhav, Ishaan. Marc Next event: Friday May 31st 2024
Tav wanted to talk about merge request 6446, a clarification and icon improvement set of changes to improve how icons get in toolbars get collapsed togther. Tav talked about the functionality and adam expressed how important it was to UX for this merge request to get in to 1.4. The developer team will ask translators to make sure the four extra strings won't be an issue.
René has fixed the CI again for 1.4.x, the extensions were updated without checking if the tests were passing. René expresses his anger at having a broken CI for a couple of weeks and wants to make sure that everyone makes sure not to force merges in with test failures. Next week will be looking into the extensions deps requirement for FontConfig and text parsing.
Martin talked about the review of the new text features in python/inkex extensions. This will likely get into 1.5 considering the large numbers of changes that will be needed in order to get it to the quality expected of the inkex internal API.
Vaibhav, last week most of the week has been working on issues with the FontCollections dialog. Has fixed a bunch of issues and collected them into one MR.
Adam has been testing a lot of merge requests and the developer team and we thank him.
Vaibhav, Adam confirm they got an email from pono about the hardware purchases. Tav left early so we don't know, but assume he also got one.
Marc, tried to find a good way to build master on all operating systems. Josh tested it on 24.04 and confirmed that this should now refix it. Marc is now 800 emails behind in his commitment to read all the activity because of the exceptional bug triaging by Adam these last two weeks.
Mikekov, wants to thank Josh for testing his merge request finding an issue in the export dialog. It throws an exception because of it, but the display code keeps crashing out and hiding the real cause. Martin also got caught out with the problem since a thrown error doesn't show in the backtrace any more. Catching the error might be sensible.
Marc wants to know when to when we should publish the next beta. Adam thinks there's still time. René asks if we should have a slot for bug triage for the bug accelerator program. Adam agrees. We still have some regressions, some blockers but we are making good progress.
Jonathan has put some thinking into how to make released more fun to work on, especially bugs. Maybe some mugs and t-shirts to fix bugs. Jonathan fixed a third of the issues in tthe extensions tracker when he first joined and it's fun, it can be be for people to fix issues. Thought people do have different motivations. A good conversation was had by various people about how to improve developer attention on bugs in general.
Jonathan and Adam have been thinking about how to ask users to help us fund these activities more and being more up front with our needs as a project. We've been looking at Thunderbird as a model for how to present these requests to users. Jonathan wanted to add it in for 1.4, though Martin and others suggest that with string freeze an exception might be required to get it in for 1.4 and a meeting with Maren would be a good idea.
Martin suggests that spending the time and getting it right then releasing it as 1.4.1, and making sure we're coordinated to measure what the impact will be. We want to know what kind of response we get from users when we explain the situation we're in and designing the interface properly. Trying hard to get credit card transactions lined up beforehand if possible.
Ishaan has had a slow week but was able to fix an issue with updating tiles with his new make selection in inkscape prettier merge request.
Mikekov has some questions regarding colors, and mikekov and adam share their work on their ux issue which will take a while to get all working. Martin talked a little about the color branch and how this will all fit together.
Jonathan wants to highlight the completion of the new working group policy. We will formalising how teams exist and their reponsibilities. We will be transforming the developer team to the developer working group, wwe need a charter which will be submitted to the plc. We'll review and spend next week's meeting May 31st.
See everyone next week!