Dear Developers,

Present: Martin, Jonathan, Marc, Nicco, Tav, Thomas, James

Don't forget to vote for your about screen favorite! Developers briefly discussed their favorites. https://inkscape.org/gallery/=artwork/inkscape-13-about-screen-contributor-v...

The first alpha was released at the weekend. The developer team gave thanks to Marc, René and Maren for their hard work on getting the release out and everyone notified and coordinated.

One thing to note is that because of a last minute crash fix (by Martin) the alpha tag is one commit behind the actual released code. We could re-tag it, but we want to avoid force pushing when possible.

Martin is making a video to invite people to test the alpha. Hopefully including a demostration of the crash features and how to report a bug to the project. Martin will post a link when it's ready.

Jonathan has been working on two things. Guiding the AI importer to help Nicco improve the speed of the parser, with more specific python code. Completing the decoding of how text is stored in the illustrator file format which is complex binary format which isn't documented anywhere so needs careful reading. Text is not on the roadmap for the ai importer currently, but it is ready to be implemented when the time comes.

Nicco has been writing more custom parsers for the ai importer and gearing up for the next steps. The contract is aproximately 40% complete and we expect that now the parsing elements are coming to their conclusion that the rest of the implementation will speed up from here. Shapes with properties and colors.

Martin wanted to know if there was a testing plan scheduled. Jonathan says there's no specific schedule, but in a aprox. two months they should be ready to open up testing to regular users and hopefully have most of the elements supported.

Nicco had a question about translations using weblate. Inkscape tried it in the past and it was too slow. Recommending Nicco talk to Maren and the translator team specifically about what tools they need and their assessment of the weblate and other possible translation technologies since the dev team isn't the right people to ask.

Gtk4 vote is waiting on completion. The hiring comittee will meet after the plc meeting and a new mailing list is being created to handle the two job parts. One for internal and one for external. Marc created a mailing list and invited all the prospective partipants in preparation for the comittees meeting.

The proctor vote for the elections is going to take another two days, but has three votes in favour so has already passed. Elections should follow after that.

GSoC proposals ends tomorrow. We have six proposals but some of them are not eleigable. We looked over several propositions and they will be formally ranked and we will select which ones we want to then push forwards. The GSoC team will meet at 7pm on Thursday to talk about the proposals.

PLC review meeting is this weekend, Marc sends his appologies as he will not be able to attend.

Tav made an attempt at converting the event controllers for Gtk4 and says he basically failed. The major reason is that this particular controller scheme has not been backported to Gtkmm3, when the C version was attempted it causes issues. This is the biggest bottle neck for Gtk development. He made a sandbox program to text each version https://gitlab.com/Tavmjong/gtk_sandbox/-/tree/master/gtk_event There's a GSoC Gtk4 proposal which can be coordinated with this work and the prospective contracts.

Martin has published a blog post with Rafael and himself for the issues fixed in the accelerator program. Please see https://inkscape.org/*membership/blog/march-bug-accelerator-2023/

We reviewed four merge requests in our meeting activity: 4396, 4105, 3938 and 5217. None were merged, but some tagged and commented on to push them forwards. Reminder: this acivity works by picking the four non-draft oldest updated merge requests. Currently we have 141 open merge requests, but many of them are drafts.

Thanks everyone for coming to the meeting. Next meeting is Tuesday April 11th

Best Regards, Martin Owens