Dear all,

here are the notes from today's meeting.

Dev meeting Sep 28 2024

Present: Tav, Mc, Jonathan, Martin

1.4-rc was uploaded to the website.

Ravi is supposed to restart his GSoC in the upcoming week.

Tav hast been working on the File dialogs. Opening: saving is working on his PC. Preview is handled by the file browser instead of ourselves. Saving is difficult, because it relies on the extension of the target file name to chose the format. There is no option to add custom fields. Tav proposes to let the export dialog decide the format to save to, and the file chooser there only decide about the filename. The settings button there can be used to set all options specific to a file format (e.g. SVG: save as plain SVG, clean up css, and so on). In general, the Import / Export system is way over-engineered. At the same time, a rework of import/export on the command line is in order. PBS's MR does the "minimum in order to get it to work", but doesn't address the proposed architectural / UX changes, so it goes into a different direction.

Jonathan has worked on the Extensions system. The final target is to completely separate out python dependencies - nothing is installed by default, and extensions authors needs so specify their dependencies same as in any ordinary Python package. This makes extensions more backwards-compatible with older Inkscape versions, and allow authors to request any dependency they want. For now, the first step was splitting out inkex into a new repository (svgpie) and setting up a new pipeline and build system there.

Martin is compiling Inkscape master on the new Pop!OS, seems to work.

Marc has worked on the translations system, trying to simplify the workflow for translators.

Some discussion related to pre-release checklists. Need to unify them - there is one written by Nathan, one written by Vectors, and one on the Wiki. After the end of the meeting, Martin and Marc worked on this

Martin has received a few more responses on the Developer Survey (24 in total). Almost everyone identified as a programmer. Half of them were active in 2024, almost all of them work on Debian or Fedora/Arch. Build instructions are found, but they only work for 1/3. The vast majority of contributors are motivated by public service and personal learning. Issues raised: - developer documentation is all over the place - Python extensions need more how-to's - Windows should use the native toolchain (msvc) - Merge request take too long to approve / merge. - Code base is well-organized, but is a lot to understand. Detailed results follow on the mailing list.

Martin proposes to move all developer documentation from website & wiki into the repository, to get more contributions to it and make it more organized. The website still needs to provide the required information to get started with contributing, e.g. how to check out the repository and linking to the compile instructions (then a md file in the repo). There is general agreement with this idea.

We discussed (lack of) Windows developers. Consensus is we need to invest into the infrastructure - building using Windows-native tools, giving Windows dev the experience they are used to, and updating the documentation. Maybe conduct developer experience interviews? This would be target developer experience, not CI. Martin wants to talk to René first.

Marc will update the install_dependencies script to not break if libspelling is not found.

Best regards

Jonathan