Attending: Marc, Martin, NPJ, Nicco, Johnathan, René, pbs, Mikekov
The next developer meeting is 2nd March 2023: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/
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How the bug accelerator program is going (Martin)
Bug list for 1.3 is being used https://gitlab.com/groups/inkscape/-/milestones/11 developer should add the milestone 1.3 if they want issues to be in the mix. The advantage is that this list provides a sorted and updated list and so the blocker issue has been closed and instead people should mark issues as blocker using the tag.
Lots of bugs fixed and lots of merge requests are now open waiting for review. When Rafael becomes available merge requests will have a reviewer to move code faster.
On the effectiveness side; Martin says other paid contracts have been re-scheduled so time is available to work on Inkscape issues, so it's functioning as intended to create time for inkscape at this early stage. Though this is a self-reported data point.
A new blog is available to contributors. This will be used to report on work done in the bug accelerator program, but can be used by other contributors if they want to talk about their work and have it available on the inkscape website. Please contact the web admin for access.
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The recent Cairo rendering failure is related to Marc's dithering patch. It was suspected that it was just related to using an updated version of cairo, but the patch itself is implicated and Marc things it's becuse of the way the dithering code throws an error which pbs says will cause the whole rendering stack to then reject any other rendering instructions.
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A Pango problem that has appeared is an upstream issue with the fontconfig backend. To fix this the version is restricted to 1.50.11 for all builds and the windows build is pinned to 1.50.11 for now. The issue has been reported to upstream although they say they can't guarentee a fix.
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A version suffix was added to inkscape's library file (*.so, *.dll etc) this allows the library file to be placed in predictable places and should make it easier to create C++ extensions which can link against the Inkscape library of a specific version despite not having a stable API. Getting these library files into the right system directories to make them useful is a possible task, as well as providing header files or a -dev type package to allow developers to work without building the entire of inkscape first. - This causes a problem for macOS builds that didn't expect the version to be there. but René is working on a packaging fix.
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Mikekov is working on a few features and improvements, mostly UI related fixes. A new milestone has been created by Marc so anything that we don't expect to make it into 1.3 can be tagged for the next release and not merged by accident before the branching date.
Marc asks if the font collections feature is ready? It needs to be rebuilt, but looks to have problems and may need to be posponed. The original developer may also not be available.
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What kind of plan should we have for Gtk4 migration? After the 1.3 branch (or release) we will allow much more riskier code merges that progress us towards Gtk4 support. So master is expected to break more often, but we want to make sure Inkscape compiles so any changes will still be expected to compile even if they cause large bugs. Having this high risk development policy after the release is most ideal and sets expectations in the whole developer team about what we need to be focusing on.
Jonathon is creating a paid contract to hiring people to work on the Gtk4 transition, please join him on rocket chat to look at the proposal draft and see what kind of paid work we need to ask for in order to push hard on getting Gtk4 transition done with the smallest amount of disruption it's possible to have in our development cycle.
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We were concerned that Nicco had not recieved the contract for the AI importer work. But Nicco was available at the meeting and has recieved the contract. Next is signing it and sending back to the SFC, and Johnathan is organising a date to do onboarding with Martin.
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The Hackfest is coming up very shortly. There's ongoing discussions with the SFC and René regarding paying for the venue costs upfront so the particpants won't have to pay the large fees that will be due at the end. We are told Karren was unavailable so there may be some delays reviewing the venue contract and sorting out the payment. Though we do want to make sure this happens because we don't have a lot of time now.
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We are accepted into the GSoC program, number of applicants isn't set yet. You may advertise about our particpation in GSoc 2023, and please make sure to update the list of projects on the wiki https://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code
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We looked at three of the oldest merge requests as part of our regular end of meeting activity: One was assigned to Adam (sorry adam!), two were closed as out of date.
Thanks for coming everyone!
Best Regards, Martin Owens