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.