Happy New year Inkscape,
This is the first Developer meeting of 2025 and we spent almost two hours going through lots of different topics:
Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Attending: Martin, Elendil, Ishaan, ScislaC, Vaibhav, Tav Next: Jan 10th 2025, later meeting time.
Organise an event in India? There's enough people in that part of the world to have people meet and pay for travel and hosting.
There are FOSS events and Ishaan tried to organise an event but asking in Vectors but no one was interested. Martin suggested making community with other Asian contributors directly.
India is a big country alone and travel can be longer than expected. Three hour flight to Bangalor from Dehli.
Martin advises to get in touch with the plc when plans are known and we'd put together a funding.
Elendil shared the contributors map from 2023 from where everyone was as an example for how spread out the contributor community is.
Vaibhav and Martin talked about using the caps, scroll lock key. We talked about the comments and how we'd run a user experience study on the ideas and using them as modifiers in the code.
ScislaC asked about AppImages and how we can best test and narrow down when an issue first happened. Martin explained his personal process of using release AppImages for older issues and pipeline results for newer ones.
Vaibhav asked about releasing AppImages in the GitLab release.
Elindil reports that AppImages from three years ago have been deleted, but anything newer are available. Martin knows that space on GitLab can sometimes be a problem and pipeline results are deleted.
There are still issues with getting and retaining windows developers. The buld time is very very slow on windows and this is causing problems.
We told each other stories of how we were introduced to Free Software, and the change in the community over those years and what technologies brought people into the ecosystem and community.
Vaibhav has been working on text on path and it involves a lot of maths which can be quite complicated. We talked about the dificulty of fixing some of the problems in boolops, color and other parts of inkscape that need more of a computer science background. There are a bunch of new nodes which allow the text to path to be controlled better.
Vaibhav worked on a few thigns at the same time, worked on pending reviews in GSoC. We're reaching the end for the node editing improvements but the pen editing functionality wil take more time to complete. We looked at the design and some of the ways the MR needs to be improved.
Elendil has been working on shortcut handling. There is a GLOBAL vs. LOCAL setting which we have set to GLOBAL despite this not being the default there is no commit message or comments which explain why we have this setup.
Ishaan has continued their work on marker transforms. Martin says he can help with the cairo use of the API with marker z-order data. There some other regressions in markers which are separate but could do with being tested. We went through the way to write unit tests.
ScislaC brought to our attention an old issue with the modification keys where it used to be possible to change the scale of objects by hovering over one of the resize controls. Martin has said he will fix the issue if reported.
See you all next time!
Martin,