Hi Everyone,

Meeting: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Attending: Martin, Tav, René, Alex, Charlotte, Mike Terry, Roland, Marc Next: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/61/

Roland talks about the end of the bug accelerator program. Fixing the last visual bugs before the alpha, but there's a few areas and bugs that we wanted to get to but for the most part and for daily usage we're in a good place. There's been some edge cases as fixes have caused some issues themselves but we've been on top of closing those as soon as they've happened. All of the main sources of crashes are fixed and at this point it's a matter of polish.

Martin adds on top the cms functionality which is a regression in the color management support they are currently working on for the release. The merge request will involve UI changes but hopefully landing it won't cause issues as color management isn't a highly used functionality in Inkscape yet. Due early november hopefully.

The target is Saturday and the tag just before that so we have time to sort any packaging issues. Martin mentions releasing the alpha for Halloween.

Marc asks Martin about the downloads from thr 502 error page on the website so users can find downloads even if the website has an error.

Marc asks about the capypdf library and the availability in distros like Ubuntu. Martin says the capypdf dep is a submodule and we assume we have to package it ourselves for any distro for the time being.

Marc asks about the AppImages generated with 26.10 and if they work on older Ubuntus. Roland is going to do some tests so we know what distros they work on.

Roland asks about packaging and making Inkscape 1.5 available for distribution packagers; with Gtk, cairo and other dependencies. This limits where we'll be able to make Inkscape available. Charlotte mentions the cairo zoom. Martin reafirms the polcy for dependency versions and how we communicate to packages about the minimum requirements. Any building beyond that is completely unsupported.

Marc asks if we have a list of merge requests which have to make the alpha tag. Roland doesn't know yet, Martin says there's urgency to know for sure and René specifies specific windows merge request for packaging. There's extensions manager issues in macOS which makes the window unresponsive. We work a little bit on the issue between us.

We choose an alpha image from past about screen contest entries. Choosing "Titains of Growth" as a slightly scary but inspiring image. No objections.

Marc brings up the security policy for the developer team wich will be comitted to the main repository. There was no objections to the proposed text.

And next up is the AI policy: https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/-/merge_requests/8263 and the way in which we should ratify the policy. Martin says that this needs to go through a PLC vote. We had a discussion about this policy and it's drafting for the plc vote and the future of how the policy might have to evolve in the future.

The developer team is broadly in favour of the anti-AI policy proposed. With an understanding that if the issues were resolved in the future we would be willing to reassess the policy. Though a lot of the issues are deeply entrenched in the AI industry that we don't see it happening at the moment.

Thanks everyone for comming and discuss the release and AI policy.

Best Regards, Martin Owens