November 2014 - Inkscape Devel

Effective Modern C++ (book)
by Johan Engelen 20 Nov '14

20 Nov '14

Hi all, Tip: you can buy Effective Modern C++ (you do know it is out, right?) ebook with 50% discount now from O'Reilly here http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920033707.do using http://www.retailmenot.com/view/oreilly.com 22$ for the most anticipated C++ book of the year, not bad. Although you will read this book front-to-back first, it may come in handy later while coding too. So having the ebook version is convenient for searching, plus, it will be updated with bugfixes and such. The book is good for all skill levels. Cheers, Johan

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2Geom automated testing + doxygen
by Johan Engelen 19 Nov '14

19 Nov '14

Hi all, I've set up 2Geom automated builds, testing, and doxygen on Inkscape's Jenkins server. http://jenkins.inkscape.org:8080/ What I find pretty cool is that we now also have a trunk up-to-date version of our documentation: http://jenkins.inkscape.org:8080/job/2Geom_trunk_doxygen/doxygen/index.html This should make us more aware of the fact that we actually have a number of tests failing........!!! cheers, Johan

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Translation update, POT date out of sync, how do I fix?
by Christoffer Holmstedt 18 Nov '14

18 Nov '14

hmm. I've been working on a Swedish translation since a few weeks back and I just tried my translation against trunk and it was committed nicely. (POT date the same) [1]. When I now committed it to 0.91 [2] it seems like POT date was out of sync. ### How do I set up a proper workflow to not end up in this situation? With Git I would have just kept the different branches as they are and created a translation branch (like a hotfix branch in the git-flow mindset) that I could merge into the others when I felt it was ready, but I have no idea how to do this with Bazaar. ### Revert current revision (0.91 branch, revision 13646, [2]) As my experience with Bazaar is limited I don't want to revert, which can go terrible wrong. Anyone else that knows how-to can just remove revision 13646 from 0.91 and I will make a new commit on Wednesday. [1] https://bazaar.launchpad.net/~christoffer-holmstedt/inkscape/swedish-inksca… [2] https://bazaar.launchpad.net/~inkscape.dev/inkscape/RELEASE_0_91_BRANCH/rev… Best regards -- Christoffer Holmstedt

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Next Inkscape board meeting: focus on Hackfest 2015
by Tavmjong Bah 18 Nov '14

18 Nov '14

Hi, Our next IRC board meeting is schedule for Wednesday, November 12th, 20:00 UTC. The agenda and IRC channel info can be found at: wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Board_Meetings Everybody is welcome to join the discussion. This is an important meeting as we need to finalize some of the details for the LGM Hackfest. We need to decide: * Place (Toronto or Boston) * Date (before or after LGM) * Duration (two or three days) * Attendance You can read more about the proposed meet up at: http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Hackfest2015 See you Wednesday, Tav

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GSoC Mentor's Summit - Report
by Tavmjong Bah 17 Nov '14

17 Nov '14

Hi, Here is a report on the recent GSoC Mentor's Summit: Four Inkscape developers were at the 2014 GSoC Mentor's Summit in San Jose: Johan Engelen, Krzysztof Kosiński, Tavmjong Bah, and Joakim Verona. Johan and Krzysztof were Inkscape's official delegates, Tav won the special 10 Year Reunion lottery, and Joakim was there representing the GNU Project. The first day started out with a bonding session... a visit to the Great America theme park which Google had rented out. There is nothing like sharing a death defying roller coaster ride to get to know your fellow Inkscaper. The afternoon was free and we held an informal Inkscape session. Johan worked with Joakim on setting up an automated testing system using Jenkins. It turns out that this is what Joakim does for his day job so it was very helpful to have him there. Krzysztof reviewed Tav's preparations for the SVG Working Group meeting that Tav was attending the following week in Santa Clara. The next two days of the "un-conference" were full of short informal meetings on various topics of interest to the open-source community. Here are a notes on the more memorable sessions (with help from Johan): FLOSS Funding ------------- There was a very interesting session on FLOSS funding. * Paid development A point that was repeated many times was that the introduction of paid development must be done in an open and transparent manner to avoid alienating contributors. One suggested place to spend money is on code reviews. Paying a small amount rewards long-term contributors (i.e. reviewers) while encouraging reviews to be done in a timely manner thus encouraging future contributions. Quality insurance is another place where paid contributions can be useful. It was noted that paid development can be helpful to those on "2nd shift" where the "1st shift" maybe taking care of kids. Johan observed that most of the talk was about "sustained funding" (where the goal is having full time developers) vs. "beer money" (where the money helps subsidize some of the time developers invest). He's a little leery of getting into the former type of funding. One possible place for funding might be grants, perhaps in a university setting where money could pay for a PhD/postdoc to work on improving Inkscape for a particular purpose. * Cookie licking Not only limited to paid development: An example of a problem one can encounter is the "Cookie Licking Pattern"[1] where someone takes a cookie (project) and licks it to claim the project as their own. This discourages others from taking up the project - which may not be a problem if the "licker" delivers on the project in a timely matter. But if the "licker" doesn't, then project doesn't get done as nobody else will touch it. An additional problem can occur if the "licker" puts the cookie back without telling anyone and someone else picks up the cookie. A conflict in "ownership" can occur. This can be be avoided by having well defined policy about project ownership. Community Building ------------------ Another session focused on community building. Drupal seems to be very successful at this. "Web chick"[2] reported (if my ears didn't lie to me) that Drupal has 30,000 contributors! One only needs to look at their web site to see the effort they take in building community[3], especially in mentoring new contributors.[4] Good community management starts with tracking your contributors (emails, commits, etc.) overtime to see if you are improving or not. Post times when regulars can be found on IRC. ( Just saying "join us on IRC" can be demotivating if no-one is in channel. "join us on IRC, many of us are there at 1:23 UTC" is better.) Our community is friendly, and we should try to be even more friendly! E.g., keep the mail list friendly and mannered. There is a book available for free download called "The Art of Community".[5] FLOSS Audio/Visual ------------------ There was a session focusing on FLOSS audio/visual projects. * Press releases Don't let coders write the press release! Coders tend to focus on bugs and not on how awesome the software really is. Be careful with what you say. The press has a tendency to parrot the press release. * Stickers/Advertising Some projects could benefit from providing stickers... think of the publicity from having a sticker on a DJ's setup advertising a FLOSS DJ project. Inkscape might try to get "Supported by Inkscape" on Wacom boxes. (Aside: Maybe seek support from Wacom to improve support for tablets.) * Missing Assets (non-coder contributions) One area where non-coders can help is in providing missing assets. This was brought up in the context of getting more sound samples for digital sound libraries. In the Inkscape context it could be things like getting more seamless patterns in our pattern library. Overall, it was a very good meeting. [1] http://communitymgt.wikia.com/wiki/Cookie_Licking [2] https://www.drupal.org/u/webchick [3] https://www.drupal.org/community [4] https://www.drupal.org/core-office-hours [5] www.artofcommunityonline.org/2009/09/18/the-art-of-community-now-available-…

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Add new Guides extensions to Inkscape extensions page
by Samuel Dellicour 17 Nov '14

17 Nov '14

Hi, I'm using Inkscape for making webdesign, and to improve my workflow, I made a couple of Inkscape extensions related to guides. Namely - add centered guides (centered to the document) - add margin guides (set to a certain distance to the document border) - add grid guides (guides in a grid of columns and gutters) - remove guides (made by Heathenx, bundled with his permission) - remove selected guides (remove only horizontal/vertical/angles guides) Full description and download can be found here: https://github.com/sambody/inkscape-guide-tools I've also presented them in the Inkscape forum: http://www.inkscapeforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=17985 My question: How do I add a link to the extensions page in the official Inkscape extensions page? Or can someone add it for me? Something like "Inkscape guide tools: add centered guides, margin guides, grid guides, remove guides" I would also appreciate any feedback to improve the tools (code, interface, functionality). Thanks Samuel Dellicour samplify webdesign <http://www.samplify.be/>

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Inkscape gtk-3.0 Themes
by Partha Bagchi 17 Nov '14

17 Nov '14

I built Inkscape with gtk+-3.0 support. Now I am trying to test it with themes such as DeLorean-Dark-3.14. Is the current gtk+-3.0 support have theming support? No matter how I do it, Inkscape does not honor gtk-3.0 theme. I put gtk-3.0 folder with gtk.css in the etc/ folder within Inkscape installation. I also tried share/themes/gtk-3.0/ etc. Of course, I could be doing something totally wrong. Win64 8.1 etc. with gtk+-3.14.5 (or 3.15.1 doesn't matter) and glib-2.42.1 and revision 3708. Thanks in advance, Partha

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Shared Access to Project Credentials
by Bryce Harrington 16 Nov '14

16 Nov '14

[ If you aren't maintaining services for Inkscape and have no interest in doing so in the future, you can stop reading here. :-) ] For the Inkscape project, a number of us have set up various online services. In some cases the services allow team management, and each of us has our own account; in others we have a single admin account which we share. For these shared admin accounts, we now have a way to securely share the credentials amongst ourselves, using GNU Privacy Guard (aka GPG), and stored in a bzr repository: % bzr branch lp:~inkscape.dev/inkscape/credentials Don't panic! There's only a handful of gpg and bzr commands you need to know to use this, and I've written them up in Cookbook format in the included README: http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~inkscape.dev/inkscape/credentials/view/head:/R… The directions are from a Ubuntu perspective -- please help expand the README with the appropriate commands for other systems. Drop me a line if you need help. Bryce

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Mirror Symmetry Improved
by Jabiertxo Arraiza Cenoz 15 Nov '14

15 Nov '14

He Here are a screencast of the merge feature added to the experimental effect "mirror symetry". This is a example running in a layer but also can apply to other objects. When i have time i made a procedural template and a extension to it for work on a layer, and after, go to Kaleidoscope LPE. https://inkscape.org/en/gallery/item/1970/ Regards, Jabier.

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proposals for website content, including splitting the FAQ
by Brynn 15 Nov '14

15 Nov '14

Hi Friends, As a brief backstory, Martin had contacted me some months ago, asking if I had any ideas for the new website which he'd been developing, and we had some general discussion. That was before the "new" site launched. After it launched, I had some specific suggestions, and contacted him again. He suggested I could use the django editor on the staging site, and create some sample pages, showing the changes I would make. Part of my suggestion was to incorporate some of the wiki content in the site, and that's when he explained to me about how the wiki should now be only for development topics, and most of the user content should either be on the website, or in official documentation. That's when splitting the FAQ into 2 faqs -- a user faq for the website, and a developer faq for the wiki, came up. So now I have those proposed new pages finished, and as well, the FAQ has been overhauled, and split in two. And below is the info. I'm not quite sure how the process works, for approving these kinds of things, but Martin said to post to the dev mailing list. So here are the results of all my work. Oh, I should also say that after I started all this work, I noticed this bug report, suggesting some of these changes: https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape-web/+bug/1274098 I still haven't figured out exactly how bug reports are handled, or who decides on the Importance, Status, etc, so I just added a comment that I was working on some of it. OK, here we go. 1 - My proposed new Community page: http://staging.inkscape.org/en/brynntest/ (Now includes all Inkscape forums, which are part of the community.) 2 - Since the listing of external galleries was so long, I put them on a new page. It's found via text link, in the 2nd sentence in the Gallery section of Community page. This is that page: http://staging.inkscape.org/en/brynn-community-pg2/ They all came from the old wiki Galleries page, which was disorganized and quite outdated, with ~ 40% bitrotted links and several spammish entries, which weren't even Inkscape related. (I'd give a link, except I deleted all those entries, after moving them to this page, on Martin's instruction.) This new list is more organized, and current. Should the page be approved, I intend to keep it up to date and organized. 3 - After moving the list of forums (from Learn page) to Community page, the Learn page would now look like this: http://staging.inkscape.org/en/brynns-learn2/ Very short page, and somewhat boring, imo. 4 - To make it more interesting, I added sort of a teaser, using a bit of content from some of the pages. That proposed new Learn page looks like this: http://staging.inkscape.org/en/brynns-learn-page/ However, what I think would be better, is to use some kind of imagery. Maybe we could find, or someone could draw for us, some clipart. Actually, for a website which promotes a graphics program, inkscape.org seems *to me* practically devoid of graphics (except of course for the front page and gallery). I think it would be nice to incorporate some Inkscape graphics on each page -- either as clipart, that is designed to help with the flow of the site (sort of like a theme, I guess); or just have an image on each page (maybe a script could call up random images from the gallery). But I'm getting off track. Just a thought :-) 5 - Here is my proposed new FAQ for Inkscape Users: http://staging.inkscape.org/en/brynns-user-faq/ It's been seriously overhauled -- several items deleted from the original, which are no longer needed; another several new ones added; re-organized; and a TON of useless html code was removed. Note that I changed the numbering system, to more of an outline style, because I think it looks better. But I did a bit of research, and found a way to keep the same numbering system, and still look better. It's just that it involves editing the CSS/style sheet, and will take me some experimenting to get it right. So I decided to use the outline style, and I can work on the other system, if there is an outcry for the old numbering system. There are still 2 issues left, before the user faq is complete. 5a - There are 5 bitrotted links, which need to be updated. The list is attached: "bitrotted-links-in-InksFAQ.txt" In a previous message, Bryce said he thought he could track them down. (Actually, only 2 for the user faq. 3 are for the dev faq.) 5b - 5 wiki articles which need to be put into some kind of documentation. The list is attached: "2b-documented-for-InksFAQ.txt" I'm still not clear how documentation is handled, so I can only provide the list. Unfortunately, I don't have the technical knowledge to write any of them myself -- except for just copying and pasting somewhere else. I assume they would need to be reviewed and updated, for accuracy, and none of those topics I happen to know, inside-out. (Related to this, I would be glad to make a listing of all user-related content that I can find, in the wiki. I've already had a look at a lot of it. But since I don't understand some of it, I would need some suggestions from more knowledgeable folks, about what to do with it (i.e. delete, put in documentation, or leave in the wiki for devs). But let me know. I'll be glad to help with any of that, if I can.) 6 - After removing the user-related parts, this is the new proposed FAQ for Inkscape Developers: http://staging.inkscape.org/en/brynn-dev-faq/ I used the django editor, but I guess it would ultimately belong in the wiki. I'll be glad to transfer to the wiki, if it's approved. Just lmk :-) Note that I was not able to update any of the developer topics section, because I'm just not knowledgeable on those. As it turns out, 3 of the 5 bitrotted links, in the attached list, are for the developer faq. It may be that they are no longer needed; I just don't know. But that's all that is outstanding, to complete it. Any and all comments or suggestions are welcomed, and especially any typos. I must have proof-read 4 or 5 times, in the end, but I still could have missed some. I appreciate the opportunity to contribute more to the Inkscape project than just answering messages in forums. And if any of my limited skills can be useful, I'll be glad to continue to help. All best, brynn

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