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Proposal for accelerating the GTK4 migration
by Jonathan Neuhauser 16 Mar '23

16 Mar '23

Dear Inkscape developers, the Hackfest in Bensberg has been very productive and one of the outputs is a proposal to accelerate the GTK4 migration, as discussed during the recent development database. For this, we propose to hire two contractors for a span of 4 months, one GTK expert and one Inkscape expert. (Recently, on the PLC mailing list, I mailed around a version of the proposal including only the GTK expert. Feedback there and further discussions here have allowed to combine both into one proposal again.) Please find the proposal attached, including the job postings for both. I'll try to incorporate feedback until Sunday, March 19, so a PLC vote can be held afterwards. Feel free to contact me via email or on RocketChat. Best regards, Jonathan (joneuhauser on RocketChat)

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Draft for a refactoring and improvement of the test suite
by paolo fx 14 Mar '23

14 Mar '23

Hello inkscapers, I could contribute to the development of the code in my spare time if the following idea makes sense and is of value. While talking in the #irc dev channel and in the last developer meeting, it turned out that the test suite in testfiles directory is somewhat messy and a refactoring could be desirable for some reasons. Here's my proposal. First of all, tests should be grouped in coherent and standard categories. A standard classification is: end to end testing ---> integration testing ---> unit testing This classification, translated into a dir tree would be: ---------------------------------------------------------- testfiles |______end2end_tests | |_______gui_tests | |_______cli_tests | |______integration_tests | |______unit_tests | |______CMakeLists.txt | |______CTestCustom.cmake.in | |______README.md [SUBDIR] gui_tests: empty for now, just add a TODO/FILL-ME note inside it. [SUBDIR] cli_tests: *) rendering tests are made with CLI (as the CMakeLists.txt confirms), so they should be moved inside cli_tests. Therefore, move here svg files from "rendering_tests" and move rendering_tests/test.sh as cli_tests/rendering.sh *) leave here the current content of cli_tests *) add an "images" dir containing all the graphic files [SUBDIR] integration_tests: it will contain cpp or script files in the form: operation1_operation2_..operationN.cpp (or .sh, or .py etc). [SUBDIR] unit_tests: a software unit can be meant both as: 1) (see testfiles/src/curve-test.cpp) a self-referential "concept" 2) (see testfiles/src/uri-test.cpp) as a class, or even a single function, from the API. The important thing is to separate unit tests from integration tests, which are sequences of different tasks. From what I see, the "testfiles/src" dir currently contains unit tests (if cpp files perform integration tests, they should be moved to the testfiles/integration_tests dir) In addition, do move lpe images here (inside an "images" dir). Add a note on the README that lpe stuff is here (as it partially is, actually). [FILE] CMakeLists.txt [FILE] CTestCustom.cmake.in [FILE] README.md: note: only ONE readme will be used for describing this test suite. It will describe what the tests do and how to launch them separately. It will also contain a very short mention - one or two lines - of the model (e2e tests ---> integration tests ---> unit tests) used. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- There are two possible concrete values/advantages in this new struct: 1) The reordered code would be much more readable, especially in the perspective of finding and running on the fly a specific test for a specific need or in the perspective of adding new ones, or deleting obsolete ones. 2) Integration tests could significantly speed up bug fixing, other than giving a more robust validation procedure of the released software. Let me show an example. An integration test could consist in the same steps described in a submitted bug: open a file ---> modify a curve ---> apply a filter ---> export to png In the integration_tests dir, there could be, together with test files, one (or more than one) file called "integration_test_template.cpp", which is meant as an example, with basic operations done sequentially (open, modify, filter, export etc.). Then, if another example called "integration_test_custom.cpp" is created by the developer (but not added to the source tree and added to .gitignore), it would contain code modeled on the basis of "integration_test_template.cpp" and it would be automatically compiled because as a part of the CMakeLists directives. In this way, we have a ready-to-use environment for testing the API. So, when a nasty bug is described together with its steps, a "integration_test_custom.cpp" file can be created on the fly by using chunks of code taken from "integration_test_template.cpp" in order to replicate the steps. What do you think? And do you think that the integration_tests template would be really useful? In this last case, could you share an example (or more than one) of a bug that can be managed with "integration_test_custom.cpp" so as to have a useful case study? If the idea appears good and collects approval, I can start making a fork and a new branch for it on my local clone.

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Developer Meeting March 10th 2023
by doctormo＠gmail.com 11 Mar '23

11 Mar '23

Hi Everyone, Another week, another developer meeting. Thank you to everyone who responded with enthusiasm for having these notes available. I'm going to see how long I can continue to write them for y'all. Present: Tav, PBS, Martin, Mikekov, Jabier, Paopre, Jonathan, René, Vaibhav # Hackfest The hackfest is in a few days! Most people will arrive early on Monday, two members are arriving late in the evening and will have to book a hotel for the night as there's pretty tight restrictions on arrival at the venue. René will be giving further details about meals and other details, check the wiki for full details. This goes for leaving the venue too. We will be expected to be entirely gone by Friday and 6pm. Several people will be making their way to the city to hang out, or book into their next hotels if they're leaving at a later date. We have a bunch of ideas of things to do during the hackfest. Several people will probably want to conference seperately or hack in their hotel rooms if there's too much activity in the conference room. # Release Alpha, is held up by a few merge requests, we're trying to unclog the delay. - Marc wasn't present, but we have some questions to ask about how the release process is going. - René has everything in thanks to Mikekov - Jabier has two merge requests, we reviewed them. A Drag and drop has been tested but should be defered as it's not high priority. - PBS has a few issues he wants to fix before the alpha is released, One is an async rendering issue with rectangles not being selectable immediately after creation. The other is a missing library on windows called 'libangle' detected by lb90. - Reverting the Undo changes is critical! We looked at a reported crash together in the meeting, but this seems unrelated to the reversion. - The opengl performance on default Gtk on X11 can go down to 1fps with serious issues. It's a problem in Gtk and upstream gives approval for simply forcing gtk to use the image backend renderer. Questions were asked about what was the right course of action. # Other Items - Martin has refactored the export dialog previews to not block on loading large files. Lots of improvements to the export dialog. - The font dialog has a small issue with folders in the font dialog being created, it's creating a system folder when it shouldn't be. - Nico has made good progress with the ai importer this week. He's working about 20 hours a week and progress is steady. - Paopre asked about his proposal to reorganise the test suites so each of the unit tests, integration tests, and others into more formal and defined directories. Advised to document the proposal and present it to the developer team so we can have time to look over it. # Group Activity This week we skipped doing the merge request review and instead did some code review. Walking through the changes involved in the export dialog changes. See https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/-/merge_requests/5148 for details. Thanks everyone for coming. The next scheduled meeting will be after the hackfest, but we'll likely have one at the end of the hackfest instead. Keep up to date with the calendar at https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Best Regards, Martin Owens Inkscape Developer Team

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Inkscape @ Chemintzer Linux Tage 2023
by the Adib 10 Mar '23

10 Mar '23

Hello All, I really enjoyed the experience from the last two years. This year is on-site again, all lectures will be streamed too. https://chemnitzer.linux-tage.de/2023/en/ Even there is no real Inkscape booth, I will be there. As part of the Leipzig Python User Group. https://chemnitzer.linux-tage.de/2023/en/programm/beitrag/206 So if you are there I would be glad to meet in real live. :-) Regards, Adib. --

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First talk to mentors
by Clair Brown 09 Mar '23

09 Mar '23

What am I supposed to do to start to talk to the mentors if I'm interested in the GSOC project of inkscape? Thank you!

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March 2nd Meeting notes
by Martin Owens 03 Mar '23

03 Mar '23

Developer meeting for March 2nd, Next meeting is March 10th https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Big thanks to everyone who came to this week's developer meeting. Attending: Marc, Jonathan, Martin, NPJ, René, Mikekov, Nicco # Hackfest The hackfest is a week and a half away! Pono is coming to the hackfest, this will be good and it'll be great to see him in person. SFC will pay in advance for the hackfest using an international wire transfer. The money will need to be there by next week if we want this all to work out. But this is good news that there are no further discussions needed to sort this out. Reviews of the wiki as well as the developer introduction page are planned activities. Especially to help GSoC students with their common questions. Marc is planning on working on dithering at the hackfest, other developer have various activities planned for their time at the hackfest. There's no set developer meeting during the hackfest, but every day will be a meeting. Streaming options and interviews are also planned. # Releases and Release Planning Marc has been busy but is planning on releasing an Alpha version this weekend. He wants to check on the windows store release, but is confident that windows builds can be created. René has a specific set of fixes that need to make it into the release because all builds are broken for macOS at the moment. The alpha will wait for this merge request to be complete, and is expected to be complete later today. The openmp library update fixes the latest macOS specific crashes which was only found because someone opened the about screen. Marc needs help uploading things to the Ubuntu PPA regarding cpack. May need to reach out to Ubuntu maintainers to get the process working well. René will remove dithering support in the macOS release because it's not stable and is causing problems. He will also be making an ARM build of the macOS package using our own CI builder infrastructure which should mean we have these builds for alpha. Mikekov has a few merge requests that need attention and wanted clarification on what is acceptable to merge during freeze. At this point we wouldn't stop changes to strings, but we don't want large untestable changes, so most additions will be made on a case by cases basis, but the size of mikekov's changes should be ok. # Importer Project Nicco, Jonathan and Martin did an on-boarding session on Monday, and Jonathan has been working with Nicco all week to guide the creation of the new extension. There's work done on the environment and the testing framework to make sure the entire process is tested and that it fits in with how our existing extensions work. Nicco has been looking into the format specification and putting together the priority for what pieces should be worked on first. Basic shapes are expected to be working by the hackfest time frame. The type of python dialect/parsing programming which is not-object-orientated is interesting to Nicco. Waiting on getting a message out through the Vectors team. # Bug Accelerator Program Martin has published the first blog post detailing the work done for the program last month (Feb). This is the tail end of the month and Rafael will become available this month (March) Other developers are happy with the progress. Instructions have been made on how to encourage and prioritize bugs. Please use the Inkscape 1.3 tag, and increase the priority on issues which should be fixed first. # Gtk4 Upgrade Proposals Jonathan is going to bring the proposal to the hackfest so it can be worked on in person. Mikekov is concerned about the instability and lack of commit access that will be available during the upgrade. Reassurances have been made that the upgrade would not take years to complete and this is one of the reasons we want to commit paid resources to pushing it through at a quicker pace, so we don't block valuable contributions that would otherwise go to waste while Gtk4 upgrades were proceeding. Martin recommends doing a risk assessment at the point where all Gtk3 compatible actions have been completed and the fork to a gtk4 branch is needed. Everyone agrees that Inkscape's main branch should never be in a state where it doesn't compile. Although we might want to freeze work on the UI folder during the upgrade process. # Vectors There's some discussion that the vectors team doesn't have the resources it needs to respond to requests from the developer team and we wonder how we can help. Maybe we need to do more recruitment, or do join activities to raise excitement. It's hard to know what might help. René proposed that the developer team may want to request the production of a release video if there are no objects from the vectors team. Although Martin was more cautious and wanted to instead see if the vectors team could be encouraged or resourced rather than circumvented. This will need to be an ongoing conversation with the members of the vectors team. # Other work - Martin has been working on speeding up the rendering pipeline, specifically the way bounding boxes are calculated over and over again. - Jonathan did a pdfimport frenzy to find issues and ended up opening 11 new bug reports. This might indicate we need more testers for 1.3 to improve our coverage. - Marc wants the old-files text fix to be tested more rigorously before it's accepted. - René says the performance of test running is getting worse and we're not sure why. - NPJ reports that macOS is very fast and wants to congratulate us all on a job well done. # Merge request review We looked at four merge requests. One was given back to the developer (mikekov) and three others were moving code around by new contributors who never go back with comments and so were closed. Thanks everyone! See you all next week.

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Developer Meeting notes for Feb 22nd 2023
by Martin Owens 23 Feb '23

23 Feb '23

Attending: Marc, Martin, NPJ, Nicco, Johnathan, René, pbs, Mikekov The next developer meeting is 2nd March 2023: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ ---- How the bug accelerator program is going (Martin) Bug list for 1.3 is being used https://gitlab.com/groups/inkscape/-/milestones/11 developer should add the milestone 1.3 if they want issues to be in the mix. The advantage is that this list provides a sorted and updated list and so the blocker issue has been closed and instead people should mark issues as blocker using the tag. Lots of bugs fixed and lots of merge requests are now open waiting for review. When Rafael becomes available merge requests will have a reviewer to move code faster. On the effectiveness side; Martin says other paid contracts have been re-scheduled so time is available to work on Inkscape issues, so it's functioning as intended to create time for inkscape at this early stage. Though this is a self-reported data point. A new blog is available to contributors. This will be used to report on work done in the bug accelerator program, but can be used by other contributors if they want to talk about their work and have it available on the inkscape website. Please contact the web admin for access. ---- The recent Cairo rendering failure is related to Marc's dithering patch. It was suspected that it was just related to using an updated version of cairo, but the patch itself is implicated and Marc things it's becuse of the way the dithering code throws an error which pbs says will cause the whole rendering stack to then reject any other rendering instructions. ---- A Pango problem that has appeared is an upstream issue with the fontconfig backend. To fix this the version is restricted to 1.50.11 for all builds and the windows build is pinned to 1.50.11 for now. The issue has been reported to upstream although they say they can't guarentee a fix. ---- A version suffix was added to inkscape's library file (*.so, *.dll etc) this allows the library file to be placed in predictable places and should make it easier to create C++ extensions which can link against the Inkscape library of a specific version despite not having a stable API. Getting these library files into the right system directories to make them useful is a possible task, as well as providing header files or a -dev type package to allow developers to work without building the entire of inkscape first. - This causes a problem for macOS builds that didn't expect the version to be there. but René is working on a packaging fix. ---- Mikekov is working on a few features and improvements, mostly UI related fixes. A new milestone has been created by Marc so anything that we don't expect to make it into 1.3 can be tagged for the next release and not merged by accident before the branching date. Marc asks if the font collections feature is ready? It needs to be rebuilt, but looks to have problems and may need to be posponed. The original developer may also not be available. --- What kind of plan should we have for Gtk4 migration? After the 1.3 branch (or release) we will allow much more riskier code merges that progress us towards Gtk4 support. So master is expected to break more often, but we want to make sure Inkscape compiles so any changes will still be expected to compile even if they cause large bugs. Having this high risk development policy after the release is most ideal and sets expectations in the whole developer team about what we need to be focusing on. Jonathon is creating a paid contract to hiring people to work on the Gtk4 transition, please join him on rocket chat to look at the proposal draft and see what kind of paid work we need to ask for in order to push hard on getting Gtk4 transition done with the smallest amount of disruption it's possible to have in our development cycle. ---- We were concerned that Nicco had not recieved the contract for the AI importer work. But Nicco was available at the meeting and has recieved the contract. Next is signing it and sending back to the SFC, and Johnathan is organising a date to do onboarding with Martin. ---- The Hackfest is coming up very shortly. There's ongoing discussions with the SFC and René regarding paying for the venue costs upfront so the particpants won't have to pay the large fees that will be due at the end. We are told Karren was unavailable so there may be some delays reviewing the venue contract and sorting out the payment. Though we do want to make sure this happens because we don't have a lot of time now. ---- We are accepted into the GSoC program, number of applicants isn't set yet. You may advertise about our particpation in GSoc 2023, and please make sure to update the list of projects on the wiki https://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code ---- We looked at three of the oldest merge requests as part of our regular end of meeting activity: One was assigned to Adam (sorry adam!), two were closed as out of date. Thanks for coming everyone! Best Regards, Martin Owens

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Feb 14th Meeting notes
by doctormo＠gmail.com 14 Feb '23

14 Feb '23

Hey all, Some basic notes for our developer meeting today: Attending: René, imv, MikeKov, Nicco, Martin, Johnathan, Marc, Chris Rogers, Tav, Jabiertxof Hackfest (Rene): * Fully booked hackfest, see the wiki for details * Arrivals, please document when you are arriving on the wiki - CAB service from hosts is an option, Public Transport is there - Bus connection is very easy to use from the train station, to be added to the wiki page. - Payment for public transport: Credit Card and coins, Google and Apple Pay, see https://www.kvb.koeln/tickets/ticketkauf/automaten.html * Departure from hotel on Friday not fixed, yet (proposal: 5pm) * SFC might be able to pay for the venue directly via a wire transfer. * A couple of people are staying a few extra days in Cologne, the weekend. Marc: GSoC, will know in a week if we have been accepted. Major issues with the windows and AppImage builds which wreck all cairo rendering and make inkscape unusable. We can't make an Alpha release until it's done. Johnathan: - Working with pono and pushing the ai importer project, it's currently with Tracy and Karen at the SFC to sort out. - Bug project, Martin and Rafael are awaiting updates from the SFC which are also with Tracy and Karen. Rafael will be able to start work on it in a couple of weeks due to house moving. - Drafting the new Gtk4 proposal for funded work and the selection process which will involve finding the right people who can work on it. Tav: Is still working on vertical text problems in fonts. MikeKov: Reviewing some features and getting some fixes in. Nicco: Very happy to experience how the team interacts and how people get some of the work done. Asked about communications preferences, Johnathan suggested doing an onboarding video chat for the AI importer project. Chris: Vote for Hardware via PLC, Pushed forward and concluded since the vote is quite old now. Merge Request Review (group activity): * We looked at 3 old merge requests this week to try and push them forwards or close them. One merged, two reviewed. Thanks everyone! Martin Owens Developer Team

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Feb 6th Meeting notes
by Martin Owens 06 Feb '23

06 Feb '23

Hey all, Some basic notes for our developer meeting today: Attending: Martin, Chris Rogers, imv, Jabiertxof, Johnathan, Marc, MikeKov, René, Tav Feature freeze - We're now in freeze, but there are a couple of branches close to being merged - Are we supporting old OS versions? - Debian 10 too old? Ubuntu LTS? Remove RedHat and centOS. Team testing organising restarting the team with Chris Rogers and KrIr17 Martin has worked on the PDF Refactoring branch is ready to merge Tav has been spending time fixing the vertical glyphs pango problem. Marc asks, have we tested the latest cairo version 1.17.8? René is close behind and will see the issues first. Cairo removed auto tools and the unmaintained GL backend. Johnathan Last week we found our contractor Nico, the SFC are at FOSSDEM so were not available to finalise the hiring process. Everything is documented in the wiki. Johnathan was at FOSSDEM too, talked to Penpot who were involved with https://rethinkscape.netlify.app/ they use inkscape for their branding and Johnathan talked to them about SVG support in browsers. Spoke with the document foundation too about their support for old file formats. We can think about where to get money from. Spoke with the FSFE and other about what kind of public money is available. The consensus is that it's usually available but needs to be applied for. i.e. NLNet which is usually for individuals. There's a growing call for collabrative editing. Talking to Collabera, XMPP and others about these features. Gtk4 migration is a project we need to focus on and we could contract someone to push it forwards and get us on the right track. A Peer project involving one internal experienced inkscape programmer and an external person who knows Gtk4 well. What do people think about this, is this something we should put time into organising? The project would be conducted over the summer. The selection processes, what the scope of the project is etc. Rene / Hackfest René will have a meeting with pono to sort out transport costs. Chris will contact ted about possibly needing extra funding for more expensive flights for people in the USA. René is telling the host we will be 10 people. Meetings to be conducted this week to finialise everything. GitLab at FOSSDEM, credit card requirement, new contributors should email contributors at gitlab.com and people will be manually validated which will allow people to use the CI builder. We need to confirm the exact details for this process. Best Regards, Martin Owens

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February Vectors Meeting
by Maren Hachmann 03 Feb '23

03 Feb '23

Hello Vectors (and everyone interested in what we do), our next Vectors team meeting is on Saturday! Here's the proposed agenda: https://gitlab.com/inkscape/vectors/general/-/issues/264 Please comment on items you think should be added! Here's a shortcut to find the concrete time for your time zone: https://inkscape.org/cals/ Maren

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