March 2nd Meeting notes

2 Mar 2023


      Developer meeting for March 2nd, Next meeting is March 10th
https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/
Big thanks to everyone who came to this week's developer meeting.
Attending: Marc, Jonathan, Martin, NPJ, René, Mikekov, Nicco
# Hackfest
The hackfest is a week and a half away!
Pono is coming to the hackfest, this will be good and it'll be great to
see him in person.
SFC will pay in advance for the hackfest using an international wire
transfer. The money will need to be there by next week if we want this
all to work out. But this is good news that there are no further
discussions needed to sort this out.
Reviews of the wiki as well as the developer introduction page are
planned activities. Especially to help GSoC students with their common
questions.
Marc is planning on working on dithering at the hackfest, other
developer have various activities planned for their time at the
hackfest.
There's no set developer meeting during the hackfest, but every day
will be a meeting. Streaming options and interviews are also planned.
# Releases and Release Planning
Marc has been busy but is planning on releasing an Alpha version this
weekend. He wants to check on the windows store release, but is
confident that windows builds can be created.
René has a specific set of fixes that need to make it into the release
because all builds are broken for macOS at the moment. The alpha will
wait for this merge request to be complete, and is expected to be
complete later today. The openmp library update fixes the latest macOS
specific crashes which was only found because someone opened the about
screen.
Marc needs help uploading things to the Ubuntu PPA regarding cpack. May
need to reach out to Ubuntu maintainers to get the process working
well.
René will remove dithering support in the macOS release because it's
not stable and is causing problems. He will also be making an ARM build
of the macOS package using our own CI builder infrastructure which
should mean we have these builds for alpha.
Mikekov has a few merge requests that need attention and wanted
clarification on what is acceptable to merge during freeze. At this
point we wouldn't stop changes to strings, but we don't want large
untestable changes, so most additions will be made on a case by cases
basis, but the size of mikekov's changes should be ok.
# Importer Project
Nicco, Jonathan and Martin did an on-boarding session on Monday, and
Jonathan has been working with Nicco all week to guide the creation of
the new extension. There's work done on the environment and the testing
framework to make sure the entire process is tested and that it fits in
with how our existing extensions work.
Nicco has been looking into the format specification and putting
together the priority for what pieces should be worked on first. Basic
shapes are expected to be working by the hackfest time frame. The type
of python dialect/parsing programming which is not-object-orientated is
interesting to Nicco.
Waiting on getting a message out through the Vectors team.
# Bug Accelerator Program
Martin has published the first blog post detailing the work done for
the program last month (Feb). This is the tail end of the month and
Rafael will become available this month (March)
Other developers are happy with the progress. Instructions have been
made on how to encourage and prioritize bugs. Please use the Inkscape
1.3 tag, and increase the priority on issues which should be fixed
first.
# Gtk4 Upgrade Proposals
Jonathan is going to bring the proposal to the hackfest so it can be
worked on in person.
Mikekov is concerned about the instability and lack of commit access
that will be available during the upgrade. Reassurances have been made
that the upgrade would not take years to complete and this is one of
the reasons we want to commit paid resources to pushing it through at a
quicker pace, so we don't block valuable contributions that would
otherwise go to waste while Gtk4 upgrades were proceeding. Martin
recommends doing a risk assessment at the point where all Gtk3
compatible actions have been completed and the fork to a gtk4 branch is
needed.
Everyone agrees that Inkscape's main branch should never be in a state
where it doesn't compile. Although we might want to freeze work on the
UI folder during the upgrade process.
# Vectors
There's some discussion that the vectors team doesn't have the
resources it needs to respond to requests from the developer team and
we wonder how we can help. Maybe we need to do more recruitment, or do
join activities to raise excitement. It's hard to know what might help.
René proposed that the developer team may want to request the
production of a release video if there are no objects from the vectors
team. Although Martin was more cautious and wanted to instead see if
the vectors team could be encouraged or resourced rather than
circumvented. This will need to be an ongoing conversation with the
members of the vectors team.
# Other work
- Martin has been working on speeding up the rendering pipeline,
specifically the way bounding boxes are calculated over and over again.
 - Jonathan did a pdfimport frenzy to find issues and ended up opening
11 new bug reports. This might indicate we need more testers for 1.3 to
improve our coverage.
 - Marc wants the old-files text fix to be tested more rigorously
before it's accepted.
 - René says the performance of test running is getting worse and we're
not sure why.
 - NPJ reports that macOS is very fast and wants to congratulate us all
on a job well done.
# Merge request review
We looked at four merge requests. One was given back to the developer
(mikekov) and three others were moving code around by new contributors
who never go back with comments and so were closed.
Thanks everyone!
See you all next week.

Martin Owens

Jabier Arraiza Cenoz

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