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Developer Meeting Notes, May 29th 2023
by Martin Owens 29 May '23

29 May '23

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

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Branching and stuff
by Marc Jeanmougin 24 May '23

24 May '23

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

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Fwd: Election Project Leadership Committee: Results
by Martin Owens 23 May '23

23 May '23

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

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Developer Meeting Notes: May 21st 2023
by Martin Owens 22 May '23

22 May '23

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

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Developer Team Meeting Notes - May 13th 2023
by Martin Owens 13 May '23

13 May '23

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

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April Vectors Meeting
by Maren Hachmann 06 May '23

06 May '23

Hello Vectors (and everyone interested in what we do), our next Vectors team meeting is tomorrow! Here's the proposed agenda: https://gitlab.com/inkscape/vectors/general/-/issues/268 Please comment on items you think should be added (or add them yourself, if you have the necessary permission)! Here's a shortcut to find the concrete time for your time zone: https://inkscape.org/cals/ Maren

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Developer Meeting Notes, 5th May 2023
by Martin Owens 05 May '23

05 May '23

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

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Inkscape Leadership Election
by Martin Owens 04 May '23

04 May '23

Dear Everyone, Please be aware that the election process for the two empty seats has been created. Pono from the SFC is the proctor and you may invite people to stand in this election on the website page here: https://inkscape.org/*leadership-committee/elections/board-elections-2023/ Please be aware that you must be an inkscape member, if you are a contributor historically or newly; and aren't yet a member, please go to this page to join: https://inkscape.org/*membership You must join before the candidacy period ends for your ballot to be created. Please see the Committee Election Procedure for full details here: https://inkscape.org/*leadership-committee/ If you have any questions, please sent them to the proctor Pono who can be found via email pono(a)sfconservancy.org or as pono on libera.chat in #inkscape-PLC or Rocket.chat in https://chat.inkscape.org/channel/leadership_committee (bridged channels) respectively. Best Regards, Martin Owens Community Hat

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Developers Meeting, April 27th 2023
by Martin Owens 28 Apr '23

28 Apr '23

Dear Developers, This week's meeting notes are here. Next Developer Meeting in May 8th https://inkscape.org/cals/1/ Attending: MikeKov, Nicco, René, Jonathan, Martin, Vansh Uppa, Rafael, Tav Apologies: Marc René updated the build pipeline for macOS, mostly small cleanups which open us up to back-porting Ventura support to 1.2.x the target is this weekend and we can be finally done with the venture issue. Working on more automation to improve release procedures, upgrade openssl which is a little old now. Looking into contributing to the Gtk osx upstream. Jonathan has been doing preparatory work for importers, checking files are rendered correctly. Helping with the object structure importer. Dividing up the work. A single person so far in the Gtk external position, the prospect is an experienced gtkmm programmer. No one has yet applied for the internal position, the deadline is Sunday. Developers were all reminded of the deadlines. Martin recorded a user-session (a session where an Inkscape user and developer explore new functionality and locate bugs together). Also collected issues from his direct sponsors, this week Martin has been working through these lists of issues. Most are small fixes but some larger works including fixing a much needed Font Toolbar problem and import and export issues. Some are refactoring for 1.3.1 but others are scheduled for 1.3. Not many issues for the Accelerator Program this week as that wasn't a focus. Grid properties issues were worked on by Mikekov and Martin. Grids work to fix all the issues, happy with the refactoring overall, but even though users won't see any benefit, it's a good change under the hood. A refactoring branch is schedule for 1.3.1 Mikekov also has been cleaning up runtime warnings. Rafael has been helping out with various merge requests and bugs. He's dropping out of the bug accelerator program because he's feeling it's more pressure than expected and more like a job. He suggested perhaps a bug bounty program would be more casual and more comfortable for him. Jonathan thanked Rafael for his involvement and his feedback. Giving contractors the right information about how /working/ for Inkscape is different than volunteering should be included in future programs. Tav worked on the color management refactoring. There's a color profile element, which is a bit of a catch all and contains too much functionality so it will need to be progressively cleaned out over time. The developer shad a discussion about the differences between Display, Device and element icc profiles and what functionality is intended by each. More research is needed. Jonathan is interested in hosting a smaller, possibly European centric developer meet-up in the Autumn. Five people in the developer meeting indicated their interest. It would all depend on scheduling and booking places to stay. The Gimp project is hosting an event in May; Martin received an invitation to participate and talk about the integration potential between Blender, Gimp and Inkscape. The event is being hosted at the Blender HQ in Amsterdam. The invites have been forwarded to Marc and Chris R. as the people who are both physically close and with the most experience with the topic. Only travel funding would be required from our side as the Gimp project have hired a boat to stay in. ---- This weeks group activity was reviewing a merge request by Vansh Uppa, where Martin and Mikekov had a difference of opinion about interface design principles and a discussion was had about the best was of designing functionality so that it both safe, less disruptive and consistant. Rafael kindly offered to act as a tie breaker and review the merge request after both Martin and Mikekov defended and explained their positions. ----- Best Regards, Martin Owens

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Developer Meeting Notes: 19th April 2023
by Martin Owens 19 Apr '23

19 Apr '23

Time for another meeting, big thanks to everyone who was able to make it today. Present: Martin, René, Jonathan, Mikekov, Nicco, Tav, Marc Next Meeting: Thursday 19th April 2023 Calendar: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ # Outreach The developer team would like to thank the tireless work of the vectors team; Tav asked is there a way we can do something for them? Martin suggested that we have mentioned in the past funding some food and drink for online events and the vectors team does like to do a release party event. Perhaps that's a good way to say thank you. Will need to reach out. There was a question about how to keep the alpha release on the website front page. We didn't know what the vectors team wanted to do, but the developer team didn't ask for anything specific. Though some developers were not even sure if we had released the alpha as they looked at the front page of the website for news. Nicco added a simple news article, we should make sure this is formatted ok with the people that update the news regularly. # macOS Not much happening with macOS dependencies, but the most important future task is migrating the build system from 1.3alpha to 1.2.2 but René is quite busy with real life at the moment. Was able to test a few things like the fonts and the tests. There was a question of macOS supports variable font support. It should be there if it's there in Linux, but we're not sure, it will need research to know if that's true. We do know that halfbuzz is not upgraded on macOS, so we may have to help fix the issues. We know that everyone uses halfbuzz for text rendering these days. Martin reported a problem with macOS tests on the CI builder related to fonts. Wrote a new svg file to test functions but it's 1.5% wrong and that doesn't pass the 1% fuzziness. May increase the padding to reduce the fuzzy problems. René did recieve the funding for the Apple building machine and now he would like a hardware policy to help make it easier to fund hardware for developers. He will ask various people for information and get back to use for it. # Font Refreshing Martin asked about including the font refresh merge request in 1.3. The consensus was that this is a new feature and most developers haven't seen this feature in other programs. But some programmers did express sympathy with users that this is a long standing issue in Inkscape but ask everyone to bare with us. Each operating system will need it's own implementation. There's two main issues one is the signal from the operating system that fonts have changed at all, and the second is asking pango/fontconfig to refresh it's font context. We know that these are not always available in macOS and Windows and so we may have to fix things upstream in order to enable them. # Windows Builds for Testers We have a conflict between the size of the zip files and the difficult to use 7z file format which requires the use of an external tool. The dev team concluded in a poll that we should move to zip files for the CI builds. This doesn't effect any releases, not even alpha/beta etc, only the merge request CI builds. We tested in the meeting with a screenshare and showed that windows will warn users to extract the files, running the main file will fail without extracting. The files still need extracting. Some other alternatives were proposed such as CAB and Portable Exe. Zip seems like the easiest to implement so Marc has added it as a task. # XML with Line feeds in Attributes Martin has a merge request to 1. write out xml files with any line feeds correctly translated to xml escaped chars and 2. To allow users to more directly add these in the xml editor using Shift+Return. There was no objection to the former, but the later needed some discussion. We concluded that since you can already add these lines using copy and paste, there wasn't anything to be gained by blocking a merge request with such a small risk profile. # AI Importer Nicco continues work on ai importer and rectangles and the new parser for speed. There's thoughts about how to reuse the work and package things with some forethought. Jonathan says they've been working on speed because the difference is so stark. How should the parsing and writing be structured? Reading through the file in a defined manner is the goal. # Gtk Hiring Jonathan reports that the current status is the job posting is out and people are being contacted by pono. One business contacted directly has an interested party who works on gtkmm and would quit his job and do the work, but he would need extra time to give notice and this might for example make some delay for the project's start. It's good news that there are people who are qualified and are available to work on this important project. We should be clear and careful about helping people who are not used to being contractors and offer guidance to anyone who ends up working with us. # Other work Tav wants to work on Display ICC (color) profiles which we need to look at because of the Gtk4 work. In the rendering of the canvas there's a step which applies a given icc profile. This depends on the screen/seat properties in Gdk/Gtk. Researching what's there and what might be needed is ongoing work. Some of this is code cleanup which will help going forwards. More to report next week. Mikekov is working on the item picker. Pono and Martin ran a test on the website to run an election as a trial run for the up and coming PLC election, it went well. Email issues were fixed. It's now waiting for pono to create the main election event. Martin did an run down of the new font collections functionality with a user, and may make a video of it from the big blue button recording. # Google Summer of Code (GSoc) Marc, we are missing a mentor for GSoC, 4 people who can be selected. 3 can be selected. Would Mikekov be available to help with a particular project? The specific subjects are withheld from the notes to not leak which projects are being selected before the time. The meeting was running late and we didn't get to any activities this week.

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