Dev Meeting notes 2020-12-09

Present: Elendil, Ishaan, René, Tav, Mike, Jonathan, Martin

Elendil was fixing some bugs on master that interfered with testing.

Ishaan has been working on https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/-/merge_requests/6844. Martin also has been working on refactoring markers, so there's some collaboration possibility here.

Martin: The CMYK Export supports most features now, except for text. Also some refactoring because markers code was duplicated all over the codebase, and went out of sync over time. Needs to talk to Tav about text. There are many different ways of writing out text. Tav prefers to use a method that is relatively easy to read back in.

Tav has been working on fixing a PDF import bug where text was incorrectly positioned.

Mike has discovered that the results from our LCH color picker differes from what browsers do when the color doesn't convert properly to sRGB. There is an iterative function defined in the CSS Colors Level 4 spec how to deal with those. Mike is working on integrating this into Inkscape. (https://www.w3.org/TR/css-color-4/#binsearch)
Martin remarks that this is related to "rendering intent" in LCMS2. Needs some more discussion on whether CSS reinvented this concept or accidentally fixed it to some specific value. 
Martin is looking into support for HDR colors in Inkscape. Some technical discussion about color spaces follows.
Mike also added an experimental XYZ color picker.

René contacted MacStadium again, they are in the final stages of drafting a sponsorship agreement (mostly their internal process), so we can get some more infrastructure. He will let us know if there is something to sign. New infrastructure is expected to be available for Christmas.
The GNOME project is also in talks with MacStadium (as in, René is also running CI for them). Currently the infrastructure is not shared between GNOME and Inkscape, but René might suggest this again.
He has also begun to rework how we package Python. Currently they are using custom shell scripts, but a build tool like jhbuild would be nicer. Hence, he's transitioning to Conan (https://conan.io/). This work will also allow to transition to Python 3.12 on Mac. 

Martin asks whether we should together a proposal to fund bugfixing for 1.4.1. Elendil agrees. 
- backporting
- updating translation
- updating graphics
- fix some egregious issues reported since 1.4

Some additional discussion about asking for donations. Suggestions: Downloadable swag after you donate (e.g. some kind of file that makes the user interface shiny) or a dialog that pops up periodically like in Thunderbird.
Martin remarks that this is not only about donations for the project, but also giving users means to participate (as contributors, or as decision-makers when contributing financially).
Maybe even some kind of "Reddit Place" instead that it's a huge shape builder image where users can "buy" areas that they can draw on? Would be a nice experiment.

The dev team plans to put together a proposal for an infrastructure project to update the website (Django) and add stripe integration.