Inkscape 1.3 beta0 available for testing!
by Maren Hachmann
Inkscape 1.3 beta0
===================
Inkscape 1.3 beta0 is now available for testing for all three supported
operating systems (Linux, macOS, Windows)!
Being a pre-release, this version is not intended for production use,
but to help us smooth out any issues that should not show up in the
actual release this summer.
You can download it from:
https://inkscape.org/release/inkscape-1.3beta0/
When testing, please try out the major upcoming features, such as:
* Shape builder
* On-Canvas Pattern Editing
* Pattern Editor
* Page margin & bleed
* Document Resources Dialog
* Return of Search, opacity & blend modes in Layers & Objects dialog
and the (now optional) persistent snap bar
* Font Collections
* Syntax highlighting in XML Editor
* LPE dialog user interface redesign
* Improved performance thanks to fully asynchronous, multithreaded
rendering
* Better PDF import
Check out the news here:
https://inkscape.org/news/2023/05/30/inkscape-reveals-tools-organizing-ef...
or, if you want to know more, see the release notes draft in the Wiki at:
https://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/Release_notes/1.3
If you find any issue with this beta version, please
report it to https://inkscape.org/report
-----------------------------
Join an Inkscape project team
-----------------------------
Inkscape is always happy to welcome new contributors in various areas:
code, docs, translation, UX, bug triaging, or even outreach!
The main ways to get involved are listed on
https://inkscape.org/contribute/
and you can get in touch with us on https://chat.inkscape.org/
Thanks to everyone involved in this beta release!
-- The Inkscape team
4 months
Developer Meeting Notes, May 29th 2023
by Martin Owens
Hey Everyone,
This week's meeting notes might be incomplete, I had to leave before
people had stopped talking. But I don't think these notes are missing
too much:
Meeting: Monday 29th May 2023
Next Meeting: Tuesday 6th June 2023
Attending: Jonathan, Nicco, Martin, René, Tav, Marc, PBS
# Beta Release
Marc has worked on and published all the beta release files to the
website.
A brief talk about the beta release schedule and how our scheduling
works between the release manager (Marc) and the macOS release engineer
(René). The new release for macOS is built today and is now live. René
has informed vectors so they can schedule themselves as needed.
More updates for macOS libraries to keep everything sharp for 1.3.
Extensions needs to be branched to 1.3.x now though because of string
freeze. Jonathan is going to push his menu updates forwards now. Though
he will need to ask Maren if this is ok.
The beta has the right welcome screens, but the wrong about screen.
Marc will work on fixing this. René needs to write a short bit of
instructions for an artist to be able to do it themselves.
# Crossink
René and Martin have worked on getting the cross-compiler working so
linux programmers can generate windows builds. This functionality has
atrophied a little since Jan.
# GitLab Infrastructure
Some issues with the testing stage on GitLab. It's a bumpy road to
clear up. There's problems between how one's own machine works compared
to their runners.
# Color Management
Tav has been working on some of the color management stuff but will put
it to oneside for now so he can work on Gtk4.
Marc, Martin, Tav and Philip talk about the color management support
will work for Wayland. Trying and keep as much of the code as possible,
but remove the bits that interact directly with Gtk3 and X11 only
paths.
# Other Items
Nicco has been working on positioning and getting items in the right
places.
Martin's not been doing much beyond preparing merges and fixes for beta
and helping out where possible.
Tav and Jonathan talk mesh gradients wrt to the ai importer as well as
Adobe's thinking on mesh gradients.
GSoc toolbar refactoring is going to take a lot of discussion to make
sure we get the best fix. The way widgets fall off the end of the
toolbar is a design which we now have to do ourselves.
Marc continued to work on the dithering patch. A discussion was had
about the details of working upstream. Marc has talked about moving
away from cairo.
See you all Tuesday!
Best Regards, Martin Owens
4 months
Branching and stuff
by Marc Jeanmougin
Hi everyone !
We've now branched off the 1.3.x series !
What this means, in practice :
- The master branch is open for business as usual : new features, GSoC
projects, gtk4 preparation, etc. The version number there will soon be
"1.4-dev"
- New bugfixes that affect 1.3 series have to be backported : make a MR
for master if it affects master, and either put "backport-proposed"
label on it, or another MR directly targeting 1.3.x with the fix
cherry-picked.
- Beta is happening soon, hopefully for this weekend.
- String freeze is happening soon : after the first week of June, no MR
to 1.3.x can contain string changes, so that translators can work with a
stable pot file (Note to translators : we don't expect much new strings
or changes until then). Exceptions can be made on a case by case basis
but will be advertised by email to the translator list. Translations can
be then submitted until beginning of July for the release.
If you have any questions, feel free to reach out !
--
Mc
4 months, 1 week
Fwd: Election Project Leadership Committee: Results
by Martin Owens
Hey everyone,
I'm sure you all got the attached message if you are an inkscape
member.
We now have two new Project Leadership Committee members and all seats
are now filled. Thanks to Pono for being the proctor for this election.
Congratulations to René and Jonathan and also thank you for stepping up
and taking on the responsibilities. It's going to be awesome having you
guys involved in the leadership committee.
Ted or Pono, I think we need to send a message to the SFC and get the
two new members inducted? I believe they need to be on the inkscape and
sfc mailing lists. Is there anything else needed?
----
One personal note; we have regressed a little in terms of diversity on
the plc. We used to have a non-programmer member, but now all members
are from the developer team, white, male and western. Not for a lack of
trying, but I think we should keep an eye on our diversity in the
project and see if there anything we can do to help invite more people
in and help them stick around so they get to be on the plc too.
Best Regards, Martin Owens
4 months, 1 week
Developer Meeting Notes: May 21st 2023
by Martin Owens
Dear developer team,
It was a quiete Sunday meeting today, here are your notes:
Meetings: Sunday 21st May 2023
Next Meeting: Monday 29th May 2023
René, Tav, Mikekov, Martin, Jonathan, Nicco
Week was eventful for René because GitLab announced their Arm builders
are now available but also announced that they are decomissioning their
intel runners within two weeks at the end of May. René had to run
around to patch together a way keep our CI builders working. Various
movements of machines had to be planned or re-planned because of this
short notice from GitLab.
We're having problems getting responses from Pono and the SFC for
various issues. Tav hasn't heard back about the Gtk4 contract, a PLC
candidate didn't hear back when they had questions about standing for
the PLC election, Jonathan hasn't heard back in two weeks about
questions he has regarding the bug accelorator program.
To help figure out what's going on, Jonathan is going to try and talk
with Pono after the hiring committee meeting later in the week.
Tav worked on some demonstration code for multi column dropdowns and
generally looking into the Gtk4 migration more.
Mikekov looked into translations and is worried about the systems for
polish translations and the quality of code reviews. Developers are
struggling with the review of these requests. Martin suggests the po
directory should be split out into it's own git submodule for
portability, Jonathan suggests using special folder ownership to
indicate which teams in inkscape can approve changes, Mikekov explores
some tooling and what might have gone wrong in the past for the polish
translations. Recommended that this conversation be moved to the
translators mailing list so that team can make the decisions about what
it wants to do.
Jonathan has been doing some assumption checking in the AI importer
project. Adobe has managed to create filters which in svg are three
lines, but in ai files take a hundred lines.
Nicco has been working on units and scaling and has written a lot of
tests. Slow but stead progress.
Chris Rogers is at Wilber Week, please let him know if you have any
questions. Marc may be joining him but we don't know if he's going yet.
There will be a beta branching event this week, 23rd May, if Marc is
available. We need to follow up with the plans for the week. This isn't
a beta /release/ as that can happen after. Any open merge requests will
have to be duplicated in order to make it into 1.3 after this date.
Jonathan has been looking into a contract extension for the bug
accelerator project. Originally for three people, reduce to two. Rafael
dropped out. Martin has been doing amazing work and we could do with
more of his time to work on these issues. The issue will be raised with
PLC members.
Martin has been working on PDF importers and fixing various
regressions. Adding more tests to make it harder to break various
complex files.
The developer team group activity this week was looking into a few old
and new merge requests. Some MRs were approved, some older MRs which
were still WIP were closed.
Thanks for coming everyone, see you all Monday after next.
Best Regards, Martin Owens
4 months, 1 week
Developer Team Meeting Notes - May 13th 2023
by Martin Owens
Date: Saturday, May 13th 2023
Present: René, Martin, PBS, Jonathan (presiding)
Apologies: Tav
We started talking about the live previewing functionality for the font
tool and how the display and canvas items stacks might be modified to
support displaying previews without changing the entire document.
Extensions already have a live preview and use a whole new document
which is fed in from the extension run. A document copy can be
expensive, but might be the cheapest way to do it. The alternative is
to create a kind of shadow item which would be tightly controlled by
C++ destructors and modifier signals. But that was just an idea.
Mikekov's font improvements branch is available for review. It contains
a lot of nice improvements, but it looks a bit large.
Jonathan is working with Nicco on the AI exporter. The rewrite is
nearly complete and Nicco has been able to work 10-15 hours a week on
it. The code structure is better and it's a lot faster, maybe an order
of magnitude. Making good progress, we'll have to see as we get to the
end of the project and then Jonathan will make a presentation for
everyone.
Gtk contracts; Tav was the only internal application and so he's been
selected by us. It's with the SFC now, although no response from pono
these past few weeks. We now have three applications for the Gtk4
external contractor. Details of who and what are withheld not to bias
anyone's decision.
PLC elections are coming up soon. There are 2 confirmed candidates and
one person is still deciding. There's very few days left to put your
name forwards! Please also review membership requests as soon as
possible.
Martin needs his merge requests approved. Paint order one is important
since it contains tests to be used in another merge request. Jonathan
was able to approve it before the end of the meeting.
Martin changed the dev graphics for the windows builds. Mostly these
won't ever be used, but it's better to have branch specific versions
instead of the old 1.0 graphics in the branch.
Jonathan highlighted a number of regressions and crashes in the PDF
importer. Encouraged to tag them and push their priority up as crashes
and regressions are top priority.
PBS worked on the shape builder (well done!) and has now been working
on the lib2geom problems. He's trying to read the entire mailing list
archive for the whole lib2geom project as well as livarot and learn how
it works, why it works, and getting in the head space of the people who
were involved in building these libraries.
He says working on some bugs is tricky but they need some more work to
complete. But he has made a fork/branch which turns inkscape into a
lib2geom toy which shows all the computational shapes and can show the
output at each step. There's calculations for the geometric graph and
there's parts of it that become out of sync he speculates. Visualiser
branch is available here:
https://gitlab.com/pbs3141/inkscape/-/commits/flattening-visualiser
He's also thinking about caching in Inkscape. Seeing if caching is
actually slowing us down and often turning off cache can actually speed
things up. The problem is how often we don't use the cache, but spend
time making the cache. He wants to look into ways of fixing it
properly.
Requesting feedback for these items.
René discussed spellchecking with Moini and polygon. There's a lot of
confusion about how the spellchecker is supposed to work on macOS. In
Linux it's easy you just ask the os for one of the available spell
checkers. macOS is baked in. But on windows there's a problem because
we a building it with Aspell and there are no pre-built dictionaries
which people can install themselves, they have to be compiled. We could
ship Hunspell instead, and we can depend on what LibreOffice is doing
and it downloads the available system.
There's an issue in inbox which Maren created as a summary. René is
encouraged to make a non-inbox issue and we can ask some people to help
fix it since it's windows based.
This is a sort meeting this week. The developer team activity was: Go
outside and have a nice walk (when the sun comes up for those on the
other side of the planet)
See you all next week. Sunday May 21st, same time, same place.
Best Regards, Martin Owens
4 months, 2 weeks
Developer Meeting Notes, 5th May 2023
by Martin Owens
Dear Developers,
Here are this week's meeting notes. This week was a bit lighter because
the meeting happened at the same time as the PLC updates meeting.
Attending: Tav, Martn, Marc, René Jonathan, Jabier, Nicco, Mikekov,
James
Next Meeting: 13th May 2023
Calendar: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/
# Beta schedule
There are a few high priority issues left to fix. A particular concern
is the slowdown in start times on windows which is the only blocker
left. The release seems really solid otherwise and no large issues
remain. We have decided to put together a Beta release for the 23rd May
when Marc is at the Wilber week and available to dedicate time to it.
Jonathan wants an earlier beta fork so the Gtm4 migration can start as
soon as possible and break master for that work.
Briefly looked at the font collections issues and seeing if there's
problems we have to pay attention to.
Are we getting all the issues that we want fixed tagged for the 1.3
milestone? Notice to all developers to make sure you tag issues that
you think ort to be fixed for the release.
# Gtk4 Project
Updates for the Gtk4 work happened in the PLC meeting, but basically
there's two applicants so far. Though other jobs we've posted have more
applicants towards the end of the period.
# GitLab Infrastructure
Gitlab is updating and everyone should have seen the various warnings.
René has looked through the changes and confirmed nothing effects us.
The CI builder for macOS was transitioned to GitLab's own machines,
it's going to cost credits so we should keep an eye on that as it comes
out of beta. It's slower too. There's some oddities in how the test
builds works on gitlab it has to rebuild everything each time, so it's
caching isn't as good.
# Shape Builder
PBS, Rafael and Martin have been working to fix shape builder issues.
PBS has been leading the charge on the geometry problems.
Martin has a shape builder templates addition which Jonathan thinks
should depend on how well the feature works after the fixes. Otherwise
we risk exposing those issues which are fairly bad.
# Other work
New fix for the object to path which preserves the paint order when
converting. MR looks good but Documentation will need to be up to date
for the object to path behaviour changes.
Marc has been busy with his work, so wasn't working on inkscape this
week.
René has been working on the upsteam depedencies, fixes have been
accepted upstream without any testing and this is a worry. This is just
as true for library updates. Will keep us informed.
Nicco and Jonathan have worked on the newer faster AI parser. Which
works well. Completely parsed a whole document without any unknown
lines in the AI file. Next is to create an inkscape logo and import
that. Payment is recieved, so there's no issues so far.
Mikekov, working on the object picker for 1.4, working well and thanks
Martin for the code review which has fixed.
# Bug Accelerator Project
The program is going well, see burndown charts on GitLab. We talked
briefly about what to do about Rafael bowing out and if he should be
replaced at this late stage. We also looked at the rate of fixes and
hours used for Martin. Martin recused himself of talking about what to
do, but Jonathan wants to talk to pono about possibly moving some of
the hours around because of the extended release schedule leaves us
with a gap in bug fixing coverage at the very end of the release cycle.
See you all next Saturday.
Best Regards, Martin Owens
4 months, 3 weeks