On Wed, Feb 01, 2017 at 03:21:16PM -0500, Julian Rendell wrote:
Dipping my toes into the inkscape-devel list.
Welcome to the team! :-)
I think there’s need for an “official” MacOS build for Inkscape.
e.g. this message: https://sourceforge.net/p/inkscape/mailman/inkscape-devel/thread/9B4B6CD283C...
There are a few non-core(???) developers/advanced users trying to get MacOS packaging working again; both on this thread and e.g. https://sourceforge.net/p/inkscape/mailman/message/35584561/
(There’s a great gist with a working procedure, including patches linked in Atsuyoshi’s post: https://gist.github.com/atuyosi/ab5499a176b0b456bca98c44e2775cbb)
It is apparent that there are multiple ways to get Inkscape installed on an Mac OS X system, each approach of which has its adherents. Homebrew, macports, maybe resurrecting the old X-based/gtk2 packaging, and efforts towards building the new native/gtk3 packages. New ideas seem to be springing up, so I anticipate more approaches to come. This diverse energy is exactly what we hoped would spring up, and everyone taking a shot at making things better deserves applause. We really need help from new contributors to help push our OS X packaging forward. We knew our existing packaging was not satisfying a large swath of users, but completely lacked the resources to revamp or replace it. We hoped by de-maintaining our old packaging efforts, we could make space here for new ideas and new folks, that can join in and help make things better.
Personally, I consider macports and homebrew analogous to Debian's or Fedora's Inkscape packages, in that they're not necessarily our direct responsibility yet still can be considered part of our larger community. So in that light, I figure we shouldn't worry too much about what we call "official"; maybe we'll have a solution we can unify around one day, but for now let's just let things evolve naturally.
Question for core team:
If the packaging is figured out, does the Inkscape team have the resources to create and publish a Mac binary that can be hosted the same as the Windows/Linux builds? (I’m not sure what the CI/build infrastructure is for Inkscape.)
Yes.
Extra: could the builds be signed so that they don’t raise security warnings?
If you mean can they be gpg signed like the source tarballs, then yes of course.
If you're talking about something more Mac-specific by the word 'signing', such as something relating to app-store registration or whatnot, then you'll need to elaborate. I've got no experience with how things are done on Mac.
For Kirk, Tim, Brynn, Windell, Chris, Lyndsy, Atsuyoshi- do you want to work together to try and solve this?
I’m most comfortable with git/github, and a quick google reveals there are some git to/from bzr tools (e.g. https://github.com/felipec/git-remote-bzr)
My suggestion would be to setup a git repo/project and manually pull in the latest 0.92 branch. Then pull in Atsuyoshi’s work, get it working locally, then in CI (travis?) In the interim, packages could be hosted as releases on the GitHub project page; hopefully the Inkscape project would be able to eventually pick up this work and make the github repo obsolete. (I’d suggest deleting the github repo at that point. No need for historic projects to add to user confusion ;-) )
I’m also happy to see it hosted elsewhere.
You're probably already aware of this, but we have plans in motion to migrate the Inkscape codebase to gitlab. This might influence your plans here. I'm guessing this will occur in the March timeframe, but we already have an Inkscape team set up on it and are using it for inkscape_web work to try it out. Would you be interested perhaps in hosting your development team work there within the Inkscape team account?
Another bit of data I'll mention, that again you probably are aware of but that might influence your planning, is that our earlier evaluation indicated the OS X packaging would need redone for supporting Gtk3, and indeed it was felt that native OS X packaging for Gtk3 would be significantly easier. We have already landed the Gtk3 changes for Inkscape's trunk, which will be released as 0.93, so I believe if someone wanted to start experimental work on native OS X packaging on top of trunk, the pre-requisites should be in place to permit that. The timeframe for the 0.93 release is uncertain, as always, but my personal hope is to see it released before the end of the year.
Let me know if you’d be interested in this and I’ll set up a repo/try to participate in figuring out the patches.
Thanks for undertaking this, and please feel comfortable to use the inkscape-devel@ and #inkscape-devel channels for discussion on this.
Bryce