October 2026 - Inkscape Devel

Request for Merge Request Reviewers
by Martin Owens 29 Oct '26

29 Oct '26

=== Message originally from Roland Taylor, who can't sign up to the devel mailing list because signups are closed, forwarding === Hey devs, In light of the upcoming alpha, and the need to get certain issues in 1.5 across the line so we can run it through wider testing and polish, I'm putting out a call to ask for your help in reviewing open MRs, testing (where you can), and pitching in with fixes as you're available. I know many of you have other obligations as well, and time can be limited, so please know that there's no expectations or pressure involved here, and feel free to pass on this if you need to our can't pitch in right now. That being said, we'd be really grateful to have your help in moving things forward and landing as many features and fixes from the milestones as we can for 1.5, as well as addressing any nits or issues that you come across that would be relevant to this release (even if not yet listed). Thanks again for all you do for the project! Let's make 1.5 the best release yet! (As all releases should be 😁) Merge request list on gitlab: https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/-/merge_requests/?sort=merged_at_desc&… - rolandixor

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Developer Team Meeting minutes Oct 28th 2026
by Martin Owens 28 Oct '26

28 Oct '26

Hi Everyone, Meeting: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Attending: Martin, Tav, René, Alex, Charlotte, Mike Terry, Roland, Marc Next: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/61/ Roland talks about the end of the bug accelerator program. Fixing the last visual bugs before the alpha, but there's a few areas and bugs that we wanted to get to but for the most part and for daily usage we're in a good place. There's been some edge cases as fixes have caused some issues themselves but we've been on top of closing those as soon as they've happened. All of the main sources of crashes are fixed and at this point it's a matter of polish. Martin adds on top the cms functionality which is a regression in the color management support they are currently working on for the release. The merge request will involve UI changes but hopefully landing it won't cause issues as color management isn't a highly used functionality in Inkscape yet. Due early november hopefully. The target is Saturday and the tag just before that so we have time to sort any packaging issues. Martin mentions releasing the alpha for Halloween. Marc asks Martin about the downloads from thr 502 error page on the website so users can find downloads even if the website has an error. Marc asks about the capypdf library and the availability in distros like Ubuntu. Martin says the capypdf dep is a submodule and we assume we have to package it ourselves for any distro for the time being. Marc asks about the AppImages generated with 26.10 and if they work on older Ubuntus. Roland is going to do some tests so we know what distros they work on. Roland asks about packaging and making Inkscape 1.5 available for distribution packagers; with Gtk, cairo and other dependencies. This limits where we'll be able to make Inkscape available. Charlotte mentions the cairo zoom. Martin reafirms the polcy for dependency versions and how we communicate to packages about the minimum requirements. Any building beyond that is completely unsupported. Marc asks if we have a list of merge requests which have to make the alpha tag. Roland doesn't know yet, Martin says there's urgency to know for sure and René specifies specific windows merge request for packaging. There's extensions manager issues in macOS which makes the window unresponsive. We work a little bit on the issue between us. We choose an alpha image from past about screen contest entries. Choosing "Titains of Growth" as a slightly scary but inspiring image. No objections. Marc brings up the security policy for the developer team wich will be comitted to the main repository. There was no objections to the proposed text. And next up is the AI policy: https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/-/merge_requests/8263 and the way in which we should ratify the policy. Martin says that this needs to go through a PLC vote. We had a discussion about this policy and it's drafting for the plc vote and the future of how the policy might have to evolve in the future. The developer team is broadly in favour of the anti-AI policy proposed. With an understanding that if the issues were resolved in the future we would be willing to reassess the policy. Though a lot of the issues are deeply entrenched in the AI industry that we don't see it happening at the moment. Thanks everyone for comming and discuss the release and AI policy. Best Regards, Martin Owens

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Developer Meeting Notes: Oct 20th 2026
by Martin Owens 20 Oct '26

20 Oct '26

Hey everyone! Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/64/ Attending: Martin, Alex Holst, Mike, Tav, Roland Next: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ (Wed 28th) Roland has been working on the main wind down for the bug accelerator program. His personal assessment is that the 1.5 release is pretty solid, but there's remaining issues cropping up. Maren reported some great issues to look into yesterday and there's some remaining issues such as the connectors tool which we should decide to depricate. Martin asked Tav about the process of depricating things like the connectors tool. Tav says Marc would have a lot to say aout this and LPEs in general. Martin has a replacement tool that was never finished. Roland asked about plugins and the ability to split out LPE codebases. Martin and Tav explained the history and the present state of these items. And we discuss some of the possible ideas for organising these functionalities. Roland asks about a more sophisticated flatten. Tav; has been working on the pdf export for text decoration. He wanted to ask Martin about flattening. Tav asks Roland about emoji fonts and them not working in 1.5. There's an update from René needed for the windows CI and then that should fix the remaining issues. Roland wants to test the font support. Mike has been working on blocker issues for 1.5. Martin asks about the stability and the blocking, and if we can get to a good release. Martin is working on the color picker preferences and pulling out the trait system so we can properly loop through categories of color spaces and not have to drive everything through lists of color spaces themselves. Alex is introduced to help with the website administration on the website to get it back on its feet from all the AI bots. Alex has some things to try. Martin will be introducing him to the website after the meeting. Martin and Roland talk about how to better present its main website. It's possible design directions for the main website and the possibility of integrating the desktop software with urls and other integrations into the software. Thanks everyone for coming,

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Developer Meeting Notes: Oct 12th 2026
by Martin Owens 12 Oct '26

12 Oct '26

Hi everyonne, After a few weeks of quiet, this week we're back to having enough people to make notes in our developer meeting and send them out.. Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Attending: Martin, Tav, Mc, Roland, Michael Terry, Vaibhav Next: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/64/ We talked about the release for 1.5, it's atability and the focus on fixing bugs. Martin asked Roland to focus on identifying blocking bugs so we can get a sense on where we are for the final push after the alpha. The alpha is still planned for the end of october. Marc is available. Martin and Tav finish a discussion about capypdf and text decoration. Involving the handling of styles. Michael has been fixing 1.5 bugs and feels the release is in better shape and a lot of the bugs we're fixing is not just regressions in 1.4 but also issues in previous releases. Some crashes reported but it seems very stable to developers. Roland reports there are a lot of issues which are not replicatable. For the cursor issue Marc suggests checking the actual images on the install. Martin asks Marc if he would save crash logs tot he disk so we can ask them to dig up the crash logs after the fact. Roland asks if its possible to have an annonymous reporting to avoid users having to register gitlab as this is a major blocker for a lot of user reporting of especially crashes. We talk about some of the internal systems we might like to have that could report crashes when they happen and how those could be agregated and then moved into issues. Vaibhav has joined us to make sure we have the flatpak package on time. Martin asks about publishing the alpha on flatpak and coordinating with Marc for the release. Tav asks Mc about when he would know he can host an Inkscape Summit event. Marc needs to ask but needs to have dates for when would be good. Tav indicates that before or after FOSDEM would be ideal. For five days, basically a full week. We will hope to avoid industrial action. Martin talked about being stuck with the rendering engine and has decided to put it aside for now to avoid burnout. Instead is focuusing on Color user interface work and fixing the text input problems reported by Maren. Roland asked about what testing would be the most helpful. Filters being the main one. Big thanks to everyone who was able to make today's meeting. Best Regards, Martin Owens

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