Dear Developer Team.
Date: 22nd June 2023 Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Attending: Martin, René, Sanodhya, Tav, Mikekov, Nicco Next Meeting: 30th June 2023
Since last week's announcement from René that he was taking over the windows CI building process he wanted to walk us through the CI builds and demonstrating the builder on GitLab. There are two windows items in the build system list, a build step which builds all of the binary objects and then three parallel distribution steps for the nsis, 7zip and exe installer objects.
Before this work the windows CI was the same as macOS, and it was disabled for people outside of the inkscape project itself. But now it's open to everyone who creates branches of inkscape.
René asks where the best place to put documentation about the new system. The change in the deps collection means changing msys2installdeps.sh no longer changes the deps that the CI builder will use. Martin recommended putting breadcrumb links in the main repository and full documentation in the new windows CI deps repository to explain how everything works.
Tav has worked on a couple of things. Replaced context menus with new Gtk4 stuff and it's been a little frustrating with things that are different. There's a units context menu on rulers, but it has one problem, it's using actions which are radio buttons and when you pop up a context menu with radio buttons it doesn't automatically pop down. We'll leave it like this for now.
Everything has to be converted to using Gio menus and that will take some time. One context menu was removed from the svg font dialog which wasn't very discoverable.
Next a drop down issue which was presented by mikekov where we have multiple columns and Tav looked into the new Gtk DropDown Gtk4 object and we can replace the Listview inside it with a GridView object. There's some fragility which might prevent us from replacing ComboBoxes correctly. There's a ListItem disconnection problem that he's trying to fix. The Interactive Gtk debugger is a god send for this work.
The new Gtk4 expert starts on the 1st of the month.
Nicco, trying to get into the work again and it's working out well. Has been working on parsing and doing a pair programming session with Jonathan and now have a complete raster support.
Jonathan did some extensions refactoring trying to change the internal data structures for paths to improve the performance with numpy especially for large paths but keeping the API the same.
Mikekov requests a fix to one of the extensions, the layout extensions needs one line added to fix missing deps problems. Martin says this extension should be moved from an effect extension to a template extension to prevent the crash and be more applicable. Otherwise he's been playing with grids, the new modular grid which is quite popular as a new feature on social media.
Martin has been working on improving the shape builder tool with new semi-transparent canvas options controllable with a slider and a working shape builder fracturing process for raster images. These are in heavy draft and aren't ready for a merge request.
Sanidhya has been working on their GSoC project.
Pono is setting up a weekly meeting, but the details are yet to be confirmed. Likely after the SFC's conference.
Martin will be in Barcelona next week at PenpotFest talking about Editable SVG. Jonathan is charged with running the next meeting, but it might be a quiet social if folk are unavailable.
This week's group task was going through old merge requests; we looked at five WIP requests which are now old and possibly not useful. One was assigned to Martin to review and the rest were closed.
Thanks everyone for coming. Hope everyone is having a great summer.
Best Regards, Martin Owens