- Inkscape Devel - Inkscape Mailman

Board Meeting Minutes ~ 2017-05-03
by Bryce Harrington 04 Jun '17

04 Jun '17

== Meeting Minutes for 2017-05-03 == I don't usually prepare meeting minutes, but there was a ton of discussion with a lot of follow ups and action items, so figure it could use some additional visibility. Summary of Action Items: + ACTION: Need to sharpen pencil on budget to see where we're at exactly. [bryce] + ACTION: Draft https://inkscape.org/en/support-us/hackfest-2017/ [Tavmjong] + ACTION: Make a news item for the hackfest fundraiser [Tavmjong, doctormon] + ACTION: Advertise hackfest fundraiser on twitter [Mc, Tavmjong] + ACTION: Advertise hackfest fundraiser on facebook [Tavmjong or designee] + ACTION: Advertise hackfest fundraiser on G+ [Tavmjong or designee] + ACTION: Advertise hackfest fundraiser on Instagram [Rob-Sterbal, Tavmjong] + ACTION: Investigate stickers & pricing for hackfest [jabiertxof] + ACTION: Decide GUADEC attendance [Alex] + ACTION: Propose donation "add-on" for Win10 store to inkscape-devel@ [Mc] + ACTION: Jot signed-mug raffle idea down on Fundraising_Ideas page [CRogers] + ACTION: Test the message patch from ML [tedg] + ACTION: Announce plan for gitlab migration [tedg] + ACTION: Discuss scripting ideas for bug migration [Mc, doctormon] + ACTION: Re-raise topic of bugtracker migration at a future time [Mc] + ACTION: Help Mc kickoff funded devel of a feature [bryce] + ACTION: Propose a batch t-shirt run (e.g. for hackfest) [tedg] + ACTION: Re-contact Mihaela to finish starting up Spreadshirt [doctormon, bryce] + ACTION: Experiment with first-call / last-call dates on board votes [bryce] + ACTION: Check on board member voting [bryce] Full log: https://inkscape.org/en/paste/11064/ === Paris Hackfest === * 5 devs + interest from a few others * Note that Conservancy has clarified travel reimbursement documentation + Process hasn't changed but it's explained better. + Hackfest travelers should doublecheck * Future hackfests may be short on cash + We have $8000 budgeted for hackfests currently + The 2017 hackfest allocates $13,000 expenses - Most people won't use their full allocation - Some people won't be able to attend - So actual expense should be far less than the allocation + ACTION: Need to sharpen pencil on budget to see where we're at exactly. [Bryce] * Should use this as opportunity to do fundraising for further hackfests + ACTION: Draft https://inkscape.org/en/support-us/hackfest-2017/ [Tavmjong] + ACTION: Make a news item for the hackfest fundraiser [Tavmjong, doctormon] + ACTION: Advertise hackfest fundraiser on twitter [Mc, Tavmjong] + ACTION: Advertise hackfest fundraiser on facebook [Tavmjong or designee] + ACTION: Advertise hackfest fundraiser on G+ [Tavmjong or designee] + ACTION: Advertise hackfest fundraiser on Instagram [Rob-Sterbal, Tavmjong] * Should we plan a community "open day" at the Hackfest? + Sticker give-aways to visitors of the event (if any) + Stacks to distribute to regular attendees to give out at other events + If it's done, designate a single day for visitors, to avoid distraction, and make sure to advertise the fact prominently + Purpose of hackfest is not community outreach, so perhaps should be left for a separate event. * The SFC-produced stickers might not get done in time for the hackfest, but the designs could be used for locally printed ones + Ryan Gorley recommends https://www.uprinting.com/vinyl-sticker-printing.html + Shoot for 20 per attendee, ~200 total + ACTION: Investigate stickers & pricing for hackfest [jabiertxof] * Virtual attendance (e.g. livestream, google hangouts, etc.) + If someone sets it up, post explanation on how to get set up === GUADEC - Gtk3 === * Coming up end of July in Manchester * Last year they said they could help us with Gtk3 stuff. * Would be worthwhile if Alex could go, pertaining Gtk3 + tghs (Mac gtk3) is in Leeds so can make it for attendance * ACTION: Decide GUADEC attendance [Alex] === Sticker Printing by Conservancy === * Stickers are designed from the about screen entrants. Artists were asked if they would be open to having their work printed on stickers. + https://inkscape.org/en/~doctormo/%E2%98%85stickers-2017-draw-freely + https://inkscape.org/en/~doctormo/%E2%98%85stickers-2017-landscape-inkscape * Designs were sent to SFC with a $100 budget (vote approved by board) + Waiting on Brett to get back to us on it === Funded Projects === * Various funded feature development ideas were floated during the meeting: + 1% zoom limit (chr[]) + hidpi support (Windows users want this particularly) + gtk3 migration may give a native-looking ui for mac os, and many people would pay for that * Various fundraising ideas were floated during the meeting: + Kickstarter fundraising based on feature sets that people ask for all the time has worked very well for Krita - krita succeeds well at advertizing becaue they work with awesome artists to promote them - They also deliver things that artists ask for as their primary goal. + Donation dummy "add-on" to Inkscape on the Windows store - ACTION: Propose donation "add-on" for Win10 store to inkscape-devel@ [Mc] + Raffle for an inkscape mug and/or t-shirt signed by hackfest devs - ACTION: Jot signed-mug raffle idea down on Fundraising_Ideas page [CRogers] + More ideas are being captured at: http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Fundraising_Ideas === Gitlab Migration === * General desire is to get it achieved prior to the hackfest + The hackfest would be a good opportunity to f2f through the various followup work-items. + But should target getting it done a couple weeks prior, else major issues could be disruptive of the event. + So need to target getting it done in the next week or so. + Followup-workitems for post-migration: - Automating builds - Fix cmake bzr-isms - Update builds for windows - Update builds for mac - Fix jenkins - Rewriting inkscape.org to re-document git instead of bzr * Ted has done some dry runs. The 0.44 branches generate import errors, but everything else looks happy. + Ted wants ~24hr downtime to deal with migration issues, so need to disable commits for that interim. + ACTION: Test the message patch from ML [tedg] + ACTION: Announce plan for gitlab migration [tedg] * plan -- send notice to the list (today?), then 24hr later change ownership of inkscape.dev's branches or otherwise configure them so they can't be committed to, run the migration script, do any cleanup, and if all's well we reopen on gitlab 24 hr after that + Branches owned by individuals may need separate attention. People can continue hosting branches in LP for now, but we might revisit this later (esp. if/when we wish to close out the Inkscape LP project.) With gitlab, user branches are kept more separate (e.g. as forks) but we can import broadly and prune later. + Do the migration mid-week, as people seem to use W-E's for devel * Bug reporting will remain with Launchpad for now. + Launchpad's spam problem has been growing... + Existing bzr revno references from bug reports will continue to work, but going forward these will need to start referencing to git SHA's at gitlab. For now we won't have the easy shortcuts from bug reports to commits (or vice versa). + Non-trivial to import bugs to gitlab.com -- it doesn't permit setting the bug owners/commenters for one thing. - might be doable if we ran our own gitlab instance. - Maybe be acceptable of old bugs/comments are just left owned by inkscape.dev? + ACTION: Discuss scripting ideas for bug migration [Mc, DoctorMo] + ACTION: Re-raise topic of bugtracker migration at a future time [Mc] === Infrastructure backup/alternate hosting === * This effort is in early discussion/planning stage. Bryce and Martin have been working on it behind the scenes but now ready for some wider input and thinking. * Rationale for investigating alternatives: 1. Capacity has been a bit limited with OSUOSL; we've banged our head on this a few times now. 2. Responsiveness to IT requests has also been pretty slow. Two infrastructure moves have had to be scuttled/replanned due to this. 3. Outages occur periodically (generally due to #1 or #2 but sometimes unrelated). * Goal is having a primary host, with a second independent host we can bring up as cold failover in emergencies. + Geographically separated, e.g. Europe + Canada/US + Backup host would be kept simple - a mirror of the primary that can be manually switched on as needed. + Even if we stick with OSUOSL we still should have another host, just for best practices in case of failures. * Current hosting has been 100% sponsor supported. We have budget to pay for IT support but obviously would prefer sponsor support here. + We're not yet ready to start contacting or engaging, but close === Funded development project management system == * Bryce still plugging away at it * Manual funding of feature development also possibility + This would mainly involve recruiting and vetting developers to take on one of the already defined and funded projects + Also need to track devel progress and completion, and coordinate payment (via Conservancy) + Similar to GSoC but less teaching, and shorter durations + ACTION: Help Mc kickoff funded devel of a feature [Bryce] === Merchandise Sales === * Temporary-run batch T-Shirt sales + "Must pass this line, limited sale" + Could just use existing logo + Need to identify a good quality t-shirt supplier (Cotton Bureau?) https://cottonbureau.com/submit-a-design + ACTION: Propose a batch t-shirt run (e.g. for hackfest) [tedg] * Spreadshirt + On hold, no changes to report + Probably time to pick a kickoff date and run with what we have + ACTION: Re-contact Mihaela to finish starting up Spreadshirt [doctormon, bryce] * If anyone wants to take lead on setting up other merchandising options, contact bryce. We're pretty open to ideas, just need someone to make arrangements and set up the order/shop/etc. === GSoC === * Just started this week, first evaluation in a month * There will be an additional $500 per student for travel costs. + Does the board need to be involved in arranging or approving the expenditures? Probably, since it'll go through conservancy... + We'll wait until the issue comes up; board can do a quick enough vote on it. Contact bryce when you have specifics. === How's the Board Doing? === * More efficient voting + Need quicker turnaround + Not all board members are placing votes + ACTION: Experiment with first-call / last-call dates on board votes [bryce] + ACTION: Check on board member voting [bryce] * Automation of board work + Need tool to upload text files to the website's pastebin (I.e. to send IRC log snippets of board meetings, w/ metadata) === Other Business === None === Next Meeting === Same time & place, July 7th, 2017.

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Website / GSOC
by Maren Hachmann 02 Jun '17

02 Jun '17

Hi all, just noticed someone updated the front page for this year's summer of code (when I wanted to do that). Was the change meant to be published, or is there a reason why it's not published yet? Could any website editors, when they make a change that requires translation (i.e. not typo corrections), please send a short notice to the translators mailing list to notify us about the page that has been changed and the nature of the change? We don't have any diffs for website edits anymore, and I'd find it unfortunate if we all had to rely on me noticing any changes for keeping translations of the website in sync. Thank you! Kind Regards, Maren

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GitLab Migration Schedule
by Ted Gould 02 Jun '17

02 Jun '17

Howdy folks, As we've discussed more that once we're looking to move a Bazaar repositories on Launchpad over to Git repositories on GitLab. We're no closing in on the time for that migration. We've discussed a schedule in the board meeting this afternoon and I wanted to make sure everyone is aware of the plan. We're expecting 24-hours of "downtime" as part of this. Step 1:

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Inkscape Board meeting at Noon PDT today.
by Tavmjong Bah 02 Jun '17

02 Jun '17

Hi, Just a reminder there is an Inkscape board meeting today in less than two hours. http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Board_Meetings Everybody is welcome to participate. Tav

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Paris Hackfest Update
by Tavmjong Bah 02 Jun '17

02 Jun '17

Hi all, The Paris hackfest is less than a month away! It's time to start planning an agenda. Please help with this by adding topics to: http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Hackfest2017_Topics If you haven't signed up yet, it's not too late to. Please add your name to: http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Hackfest2017_Attendees Tav

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Git Migration
by Martin Owens 02 Jun '17

02 Jun '17

Hi Bryce + devs, I'm a bit worried about the Git migration. I'm a bit impatient ;-) but we haven't heard much from KK about availability and I'm thinking we need to plan a contingency. Thoughts? Are we planning to get this done at the hackfest? Best Regards, Martin Owens

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last used style
by brynn 01 Jun '17

01 Jun '17

Hi Friends, I've been trying to get my nerve up to ask about this, since I first used Inkscape, 10 years ago. So here goes. Can anyone give me a good reason for having all the tools styles set, by default, to last used style? In 10 years, I have never met, seen, or heard of anyone who needs this feature; while we have to answer this same general problem for newbies over and over and over again. Countless times I've answered these messages. I'll bet I don't even need to give examples, do I? I would guess it's the single biggest stumbling block for newbies. It certainly must be the single most asked question by newbies. At least in forums, and probably LP Answers. I can imagine rare scenarios, where someone might actually use this feature. But if I want an object the exact same style as the one before, I simply duplicate (or copy/paste, or paste style). So it's a mystery to me why last used style should be the default behavior, when we have all these other perfectly suitable features, which don't cause newbies (and those who help them) so many headaches. I understand if we might not want to throw it out the window ((although that's what I would do with it, haha)). But is there any chance we could at least not have it to be the default behavior? When we first download and open Inkscape for the first time, all the tools have a characteristic style. If I recall, it's a pink rectangle, light blue circle, yellow star, and green spiral, with darker tones for the strokes, and all partially transparent. And for Pencil and Pen, I guess it's the black stroke. Could we just keep those styles, but set all the tools for "This tool's own style" instead of "Last used style"? And could we have this the default behavior for when newbies first install Inkscape? Oh, it would save us SO, so much time, those of us who answer newbie questions, day in and day out. I'd be so happy to write up a bug/feature request report for this, if there isn't some serious objection. Thanks for listening, brynn

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Inkscape Board Meeting
by Bryce Harrington 01 Jun '17

01 Jun '17

== Board Meeting == We'll hold another board meeting this Friday, March 3rd at noon Pacific in #inkscape-devel. All members of the community are welcome to participate. http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Board_Meetings Agenda: + Sponsorship Levels + Hackfests: Portland, Paris + Merchandise sales + Inkscape gitlab + Other

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Scribus 1.5.3 released
by "Christoph Schäfer" 29 May '17

29 May '17

The Scribus Team is proud to announce the release of development release 1.5.3, another major step on the way to Scribus 1.6.0. In addition to being a milestone in terms of typographic features, the Scribus Team is convinced that 1.5.3 has become stable enough to be used in new workflows and documents in a similar way to the transition from 1.3.3.x to 1.4.0 after the release of version 1.3.6. However, care must be taken, because this is still a development release. Scribus 1.5.3 is very fast and has been thoroughly tested. Generally, everything that works reliably in 1.4.x also works in 1.5.3, but it's faster and more versatile. On top of that, it includes additional and already overwhelmingly reliant features galore. Most Important Changes ====================== - The most important change isn't immediately visible, namely a completely rewritten text layout engine, which supports complex scripts like Arabic, Hindi or Thai, as well as providing access to advanced OpenType features, such as ligatures and alternate glyphs. - Altogether, about 500 languages and/or scripts are supported. Please note that as of version 1.5.3, Scribus is supposed to render these diverse writing systems, which still needs thorough testing by those who are familiar with them. - Typing on the canvas and text rendering in general has become a lot faster. - Previews for fonts are now available in font selectors. - The "Text" tab has been removed from the Properties Palette and is now a separate UI palette. - The performance of copying and pasting objects in/from/to files with huge color palettes has been vastly improved. - An import filter for Krita's KRA format has been added. - Scribus now follows the XDG standard for configuration files. Therefore, the Scribus preferences directory has moved from ~/.scribus/ to a new default location: ~/.config/scribus/ - Color selectors display the color values as a tooltip. - A longstanding problem with the launch option for an external image editing program has been resolved. Until version 1.5.3 it was necessary to manually close the external program before it could be started again from within Scribus. This is no longer necessary. - The "Wikipedia RAL Classic" color palette has been updated, this time using Wikipedia's LAB color values. - A script called "Caption" has been included, which adds a text frame to an image frame, based on the latter's proportions. - The "Autoquote" scripts now supports inverted guillemets via the "de-g" parameter. - Code improvements have been made based on recommendations from using both the Coverity scan tool (https://scan.coverity.com/) and the "clazy" tool (https://github.com/KDE/clazy). These changes improved efficiency, removed bugs and improved security. - Countless bugs, mostly introduced with the new features in earlier releases of 1.5.x, have been fixed. For details see the 1.5.3svn changelog (https://bugs.scribus.net/changelog_page.php?version_id=102) New Dependencies ================ - As of version 1.5.3, the minimum Qt version to compile the program is 5.5. - harfbuzz and libicu, as well as the related development packages are now required. Caveats - Some newly introduced features, like footnotes, may not function as desired, at least not yet. - The file format may undergo some changes between the current release and 1.6.0, so we advise caution when it comes to workflows that use automated document generation or parsing. - Vertical writing systems aren't supported for the time being, but support will be added in a later release. - The Online Help hasn't been completely updated, and it won't be until the final 1.6.0 release. Special Credits =============== - This version builds significantly on the code from 1.5.2 with the work that the Oman House of Open Source Technology team, led by Khaled Hosny, delivered. - 1.5.3 uses all of the remainder of the code, and we have Fahad Al-Saidi to thank for his continued work and especially for the bug triaging and code changes. - Andreas Vox introduced a layout cache to speed up text rendering. - William Bader has fixed the issue of launching several instances of an external image editing program. - Contributions to GUI translations via participants on the Transifex translation platform Primary Download Locations ========================== - Installation packages for Windows, Mac OS X, a Linux AppImage and the source code are available here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/scribus/files/scribus-devel/1.5.3/ - Fedora and CentOS RPMs: http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/mrdocs - OpenSUSE, SLED, and SLES RPMs: http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/mrdocs - Packaging for other Linux distributions, *BSD, Solaris and OpenIndiana is beyond our influence. We recommend updating the respective repository data on a regular basis. - Windows Portable App: http://portableapps.com/apps/office/scribus_portable#test Download Verification ===================== Please visit the official announcement on https://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/1.5.3_Release for Sha256 and Sha1 checksums. Expectations for Scribus 1.5.4 ============================== - An entire rebuild of the palette system used in Scribus, enabling a cleaner and more flexible GUI - Updates to dependencies, with a likely increase to Qt 5.6 - Migration of build systems or targeted versions of operating systems to later versions Credits ======= The Scribus Team would like to thank Anduin.net and Modirum for their continued hosting of all of the Scribus websites. We are grateful to the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie and Linux New Media (Germany) for sponsoring. The Scribus Team is also honored to have Resene Colours (New Zealand), dtp studio Oldenburg (Germany), Scientific Illustration Services Corp. (USA), the Newspaper Association of America (USA), Software Consulting Services (USA), freieFarbe e.V. (Germany), bauwerk Kommunikationsdesign (Germany) as Special Supporters and donors of color palettes and other content since the 1.4.x release, just like we are grateful to the owner of Vector Portal for the permission to distribute some of his work as Scribus Templates. Porting Scribus to OS/2 and eComStation is being supported by Serenity Systems (USA). Finally, the Scribus Team would like to thank the many end users, translators, testers and contributors who helped us with this release.

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OpenType Variable Fonts on Inkscape (and possibly other libre graphics tools)
by Felipe Sanches 24 May '17

24 May '17

Hello, Inkscape friends, == Intro == ** You can skip this part if you already know me or if you don't really care for the intro details :-D ** I've been active in Inkscape development a long time ago (circa 2007-2010, I think), but then I moved on to collaborate on other projects such as GNU LibreDWG, FontForge, Metapolator, Kicad and a few programs in the 3D printing toolchain such as Sprinter/Repetier firmware, Pronterface and OpenSCAD. Also I'm regularly contributing to the MAME Project and heavily interested in Coreboot/Libreboot, etc. And during the past year and a half I've been developing and maintaining the FontBakery project, a Quality-Assurance testsuite for font families. == LGM Brazil == Last month I've attended the Libre Graphics Meeting here in Brazil and had the opportunity to meet a few GIMP developers. Unfortunately no-one from the Inkscape team was there this time, other than the couple of Brazilian past contributors (myself and Aurelio Heckert). == Variable Fonts == Dave Crossland brought to my attention that there's an opportunity for the "big four" libre graphics programs that heavily rely on typography (Inkscape, GIMP, Scribus and LibreOffice) to implement support for OpenType Font Variations (a.k.a. "variable fonts") before the proprietary graphics applications do so. It seems that while the major web-browsers are all already jumping into the "variable fonts" technology, the proprietary graphics tools are not so fast. The underlying free software libraries already provide the support for that. Harfbuzz did implement support on its January release, providing a new API for OpenType variable fonts. I wonder if anyone here is interested in getting involved in the implementation of support for that in Inkscape. == My plan for Variable Fonts in Inkscape (and perhaps GIMP) == With that in mind, I am planning to spend a full day per work-week dealing with this. I have started to do so last week. I spent last Thursday setting up my development machine to properly build GIMP and Inkscape from source. I know Inkscape is moving into git at some point very soon, but since it seems it did not happen yet, I decided to use git-bzr to have my own local git tree, where I feel more comfortable working. Then I built several dependency libraries needed to build these projects. GIMP still fails to build, but I already got Inkscape-devel built and running. Nice to see the recent improvements someone did on the measurement tool I implemented years ago. Thanks a lot! After that, I read the relevant portions of the text-handling code in Inkscape sources (most of it on the src/libnrtype/ directory). I see that it relies on Pango for setting up font description data-structures based on the user's font selection. And, if I got it right, Pango uses HarfBuzz+Cairo as its underlying layout & rendering backend. So, my first thought is that we may add a variable fonts "bridge-API" on pango that redirects the calls to the underlying harfbuzz hb_ot_var_* API. Or the other alternative would be to entirely migrate Inkscape code into using harfbuzz directly (ditching pango usage). Please correct me if I misunderstood things here, but it seems to me that both approaches could work, while the first is a quick and dirty hack while the second would be the nicer way of doing things even though it would require a larger coding effort. I'm copying Behdad Esfahbod in this thread as he is the developer of both Pango and HarfBuzz and may be interested in commenting on this. Happy Hacking, Felipe "Juca" Sanches

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