Hi Devels!
Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Attending: Martin, Tav, Charlotte, Elendil, Mike Terry, Roland Tarlor, Seán Burke Next: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/64/
We have a backlog of 23 approved but unmerged Merge Requests which need to be dealt with. The windows CI is failing for most of these and blocking the ability to merge effectivly.
Martin is tasked with talking with René and Marc to figure out how to solve this problem.
Tav has been working on converting opentype to harfbuz, this is especially useful for variable fonts as harfbuz gives better results. We can remove a bunch of code we were using to cope with the lack of functionality. Martin asks about unit testing for the new code, Tav hasn't gotten around to it yet. One limitation is a conflict between font variations and style in file fonts. Eventually the inkscape-font- spec attribute should go away.
Martin asked about font variation information being available in the poppler pdf import.
Charlotte has been working on her own extension. Has a question about aprovals for merge requests and if the approver should be the one to hit the merge button. The general consensus is that they should for contributions from non-senior contributors, but not for senior developers generally. Though this isn't policy.
Roland has given us an update on the first full week of the Bug Accelerator program 2026.1, has been working through the priority list and get down to a short list. Removing issues which have been kicked down the road but are not actually applicable any more. Developers are working on crashes as a priority for this week. Roland is giving usability blockers more priority to help with Inkscape's usability. The end of the month is the targrt for having a solid work list of priorities for the program.
Elendil discovered a feature and wants to remove it. It's an obscure feature of the grid which allows incremental moves but was using the Alt key which was inconsistant with other features. The feature is removed as it's not useful and not documented anywhere. The keyboard bindings for some other items are updated too and Elendil wanted to know if the default should be in the xml or the code, Martin says the code unless the default should actually be "disabled".
Martin talked about the color work and the new rendering engine. Giving a brief overview of where we are and what the direction of travel is for getting this merged into 1.5. The new static color functionality refactoring is all merged thanks to pbs for the review. The ongoing work to add test cases for the drawing code should prove that the display tree interface for the new rendering engine is the same as the old code and can be swapped out for testing.
Roland gives Martin thanks for the PDF work which he's used on multiple projects so far. Martin is proud of the stability of the PDF output as it's been tested by more people and proven itself to be more dependable and faster than the old cairo output.
Next meeting is the 29th May and is the earlier meeting.
Thanks everyone for coming!