Dear Developer team,
Thank you to everyone who made the developer meeting today; we talked a lot about what the budget should look like from the developer team. I have comprised the ideas here which I will be bringing to the next board meeting to be held on June 4th 2021 ( https://inkscape.org/cals/event/2/)
Current items to be requested immediately:
* The Developer team requests a General Administrator who can take care of many of the organisational tasks which we currently struggle to. This is deemed more important than any funding for specific features. I'd like to invite everyone to join me for a meeting to flesh out what this would look like, we'll use previous work as a base and work from there. Please come to BigBlueButton next Sunday 30th May at 17:00UTC (https://inkscape.org/cals/event/25/) to make sure our proposal is detailed enough.
* We would like to budget $5k on macOS speed problems; this is to be spent on analysis first, and then solutions second. The whole developer team recognises how dire the situation is with René specifically saying that without a fix we should not release for macOS in the future.
Future budget requests which we do not have a consensus for, or details are missing:
* CMYK support; Tav would like this, developers feel it's not important enough. A user study would be useful to know for sure. * PathFinder; Taking over, or working with the Linux foundation for their Rust based pathfinder is a great way to bring GPU rendering to Inkscape. Marc is to contact the linux foundation and Linkmauve about collaboration or taking over the project. * ARM Machine for René; If we continue to develop macOS, René will need one of the newer ARM based macOS machine which would be set up to do CI builds. Improving the ability to check and build testing builds for macOS.
Thanks everyone for attending, we had quite a lot of the developer team there today and a lot of students so I feel good that we got to see a lot of different opinions. But let me know in this thread if you have details to add, or can't make the above meeting and want to make sure something is included.
Best Regards, Martin Owens Developer Team Hat
Great, thanks for writing up minutes of this Martin! Nice to get some of the discussion that happens on video chats out those those who can't make them. On May 23 2021, at 2:33 pm, Martin Owens doctormo@geek-2.com wrote:
- The Developer team requests a General Administrator who can take
care of many of the organisational tasks which we currently struggle to. This is deemed more important than any funding for specific features.
I think this is a good effort and assessment of where our problems are. I think the struggle we've had in the past is making it "big enough" to be a job while making it so that someone has that skillset. I felt when we mixed the admin and release management aspects that was great, but Bryce would probably be the only person who could do both. I'm excited to see what the committee is able to do with it.
- We would like to budget $5k on macOS speed problems; this is to be
spent on analysis first, and then solutions second. The whole developer team recognises how dire the situation is with René specifically saying that without a fix we should not release for macOS in the future.
I think that it is likely the first answer here is "port to GTK4" as they've entirely rewritten the OSX backend in GTK4, specifically targeting speed problems. There is also work on a Metal backend for GTK4.
- CMYK support; Tav would like this, developers feel it's not
important enough. A user study would be useful to know for sure.
I was thinking about this the other day and thinking that in general, this is an overhaul of color. We could at the same time reasonably add support for HDR as well (I think). While the print folks want CMYK and spot colors, the game asset folks want HDR. Curious if we could merge these into something we could fund raise on if we had a proposal? Having two major groups of folks interested would definitely help in that regard. Also, with HDR on it, curious if we couldn't do an Epic grant for it: https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/megagrants
- ARM Machine for René; If we continue to develop macOS, René will
need one of the newer ARM based macOS machine which would be set up to do CI builds. Improving the ability to check and build testing builds for macOS.
While I'm all for buying HW developers need to do cool things, I don't think it is a good idea for people to have CI machines in their homes. They could live in Texas and not have power for a week (never could happen) or move or anything else. Better to have those in Data Centers. Perhaps we could separate those into two items? Also, for grants for HW needed to support features LinuxFund has money we can tap into, I know some folks there. Also, on this topic I noticed that David Revoy did a review of a reasonably priced (for what it is) drawing tablet the other day: https://www.davidrevoy.com/article842/review-of-the-xp-pen-artist-24-pro-on-... and their website lists GIMP/Krita but no Inkscape https://www.xp-pen.com/product/602.html Might be HW worth looking into. Ted
participants (2)
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Martin Owens -
Ted Gould