January 2024 - Inkscape Devel

win32 build working again
by Bob Jamison 08 Apr '24

08 Apr '24

The win32 build, which was broken for the weekend, is working again. I just made a "manual autobuild" again, so that we can see how it looks on Windows: http://troi.titan-aeu.com/~rjamison/inkscape/builds/ Bob

2 1

Developer Meeting: Jan 24th 2024
by Martin Owens 24 Jan '24

24 Jan '24

Hey everyone, Attending: Martin, Tav, Mikekov, Krlr17, NPJ, Mansi, Jonathan, Marc, René ------ Mansi - introduced themselves, they are from India and are a computer science and interested to help with Inkscape with the filters. Tav - XML editor rewriting it for Gtk4 compatibility trying to add drag and drop but it's a bit of a nightmare. The code hasn't been touched much in 20 years. There's a couple of different options, and he's going for the tree view. He copied the code from the object dialog, but it turns out the drag and drop wasn't working in the object dialog and it was segfaulting with an asserts. But even fixing those wasn't fixing it. We discussed the details further for ten minutes. Mikekov - Been on vacation but recommends studying the Gtk4 which details all the new concepts and it's going to be important for our developers to learn them and get comfortable with using it properly. Krlr17 - Martin wanted to know how the issues tracker is going, they said they could do with some help. On bug fixing they think a bug accelerator program would greatly help. For the triaging side, we should do a mentorship program where we spend some time getting new people into the project. People on the forum might be a good source of potential candidates. Jonthan - Bug accelerator program, has a draft but is not ready to be submitted. The goal is to have people apply for the position. We talked briefly about the way the new project should be run. We created a poll to ask people who would be interested in joining the hiring committee. Marc and Jonathan said yes. Everyone else abstained. Another poll for who would be interested, and there were people who answered yes (named withheld). A third poll about if we should run the program again came back with a 100% in favor vote that we should do it. Jonathan will set up a PLC vote at the weekend. René - Martin asked about a testing bug on macOS and René will look at it and will be able to run the whole test suite locally to find out what's going on. René is reviewing the mac-statium article and keep in touch with those guys. Also working on Gtk building stuff in general. We talked briefly about rocket chat, matrix and alternative chat, we will continue to have this chat to make sure we're doing the right thing. We're not going to rush into making a change at this time though. Thanks to everyone who came and talked about developer issues. It was a full and fun meeting today. Best Regards, Martin Owens

1 0

Inkscape Chat Room
by Martin Owens 22 Jan '24

22 Jan '24

Hey everyone, Inkscape has hosted our own chat services at chat.inkscape.org since 2018, we've been using the open source server RocketChat in order to provide the project communication for both internal use and for interacting with users and answering their questions. The Rocket Chat upstream organisation has recently become hostile to it's users and admins, developing all sorts of covert design patterns to push self-hosted instances into signing up to expensive per-user licenses and proprietary extensions. It's also sending information about our server back to rocket chat themselves. The most recent upgrade has left us with a difficult and problematic path ahead as we can't really continue to use rocket chat as a server software. But this has to be a community wide discussion as the service is the most used internal communication channel and is used by many people and many teams for lots of things. These are the questions I need you to answer, please reply here or send me a personal email or message with your answers: == Questionnaire == 1. Do you think we should move away from rocket chat? This is a nominal question since I don't think we can administratively support it going forwards, but we should know your thoughts anyway. 2. Should we reverse engineer the rocket chat database in order to try and keep the history? There are no known tools of retaining the history and if we move to another chat system, our history will be wiped clean. How is history important to you or the project? 3. What replacement chat systems have you used with other projects that you think might be a good fit for our use cases? (see below) 4. Can you expand upon our use cases with the ways you current use, or know that our rocket chat is being used? (see below) 5. Any other comments? == Use Case == I'm drafting a use case document to guide the decision on what to move towards. This might take us time to develop the solution so don't worry about any rash movement, for now we have time to work through the problem together. You don't have to edit this document yourself, I'll digest answers where I can, but if you want to have a direct hand in drafting I'm inviting people to go to this document and help out: https://office.inkscape.org/nextcloud/index.php/s/FcTg4QsdstnDeMA == Final thoughts == Sorry to spring this problem on the project. After talking with Marc about the way rocket chat is behaving and how their upgrade paths are causing us issues, we believe this process needs to start now. Best Regards, Martin Owens Project Infrastructure Hat

4 3

Sending email to get added to list
by Mansi 17 Jan '24

17 Jan '24

mansins168(a)gmail.com

1 0

Installing build dependencies on Ubuntu using APT
by Thomas Larsen Wessel 16 Jan '24

16 Jan '24

I am trying to build inkscape (master) on Ubuntu 22.04. The list of dependencies is long, and for each of them I am "guessing" the package name I need to install in APT. Thanks to a tiny bit of experience, googling and APT autocompletion, this is possible, though it takes 10sec to a few minutes for each package. But I feel I am missing something. Is there no smarter way than this guessing? Sincerely, Thomas

3 3

Inkscape 1.4 preparations and schedule
by Marc Jeanmougin 09 Jan '24

09 Jan '24

Hi all ! As you could see in Martin's email, we've been discussing release-related topics earlier in the developer meeting. We have mostly decided to carry out a release this year as usual (with a release in May), which will be using *GTK3*. Hence, later this year the master branch will lead to a 1.4.x branch, and after this point the gtk4 branch will be merged into master. We have this year a more modest amount of big shiny features into the release, but that's not an issue, and certainly not a reason to not make them available to our users :) However since it means that master is currently fairly stable, this gives some leeway to add simple features and changes if needed. If you plan to do "big" changes for 1.4 (or changes to the "core" (rendering, etc)), please get in touch on the chat as soon as possible to discuss them (before middle of January), otherwise for things like UX improvements or new isolated functions, feel free to work on them until the beginning of March, at which point we'll branch and produce a Beta (and then, only bugfixes until the release, as usual) Bugfixes are always welcome until late in the release process to get a polished release. Thanks everyone ! -- Marc

1 0

Developer Meeting, Jan 8th 2024
by Martin Owens 08 Jan '24

08 Jan '24

Thanks to everyone who came today; Attending: Marc, Jonathan, Martin, René, Tav, James, Mikekov Next Meeting: Tuesday January 16th Calendar: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ # FOSDEM We started by talking about FOSDEM, confirming which days we would be available. We need to book train tickets, Mark will be asking his employer, Martin will be asking pono. # Release Planning We spent the end of the meeting planning out the 1.4 release and what this would look like. We have decided that we will have one more Gtk3 release with fewer features for 2024 to give us extra room to making the Gtk4 release as good as it can be. There will be a refactoring freeze in a about a week and a feature freeze in a couple of months. So if developers have plans for features and fixes, now is the time to focus on getting them into 1.4 The Gtk4 branch merge will be posponed until after the 1.4.x branch split to make this process easier. # Developer topics Marc - Needed to update the windows store version of Inkscape Martin - Working on color refactoring, including a mass of tests and talked about using gtest in advanced ways James - Continuing work on fixing issues with the sp-grid and dealing with older files and making sure we're not corrupting old files too much. Marc and Martin pointed james towards an old archive on openclipart svgs to search for wild data. René - Has been working on the Gtk4 building for windows 7zip and will proceed from there into macOS building. It now compiles thanks to some fixes from pbs. - Additionally, MacStadium will release an article about us we don't know the contents but they've been friendly. - Is thinking about what we will do at LGM in Ren, France. It's not close to much. We talked a bit about the cutural ameinaties of various european towns. Mikekov - Has been working on a path specific element in the object attribute dialog. Designed by adam, It's requiring a refactoring and it'll take a bit of time to complete. - Found a new book for Gtk4 which describes the way the data model works and thinks others should read it too. GTK4 Rust book: https://gtk-rs.org/gtk4-rs/stable/latest/book/ Tav - Fixed a bug with the dash code using the Gtk grid view, the cursor would reset to t he start when editing in that box which made it hard to use. - The Gtk4 work is going slow at the moment. Thanks everybody! Best Regards, Martin Owens

1 0

How is the automatic/background font substitution implemented?
by Thomas Larsen Wessel 06 Jan '24

06 Jan '24

If opening a file using font "Times" in Inkscape on a Windows machine without that font installed, it uses Arial for rendering instead. For all the cases I tried, including generic font names such as "serif" and "sans-serif", it defaulted to the best replacement candidate that I know of. How is that implemented? Is this logic part of Inkscape itself? Does it use an external library? Does it use some service/interface on Windows (which other apps apparently don't use)? Most apps do this well on Linux, because they simply rely on fontconfig. But very few apps do well on Windows. Good job, thanks :) Sincerely, Thomas

1 0