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