On Mon, Feb 24, 2014 at 11:14:41AM -0800, Josh Andler wrote:
Hey All,
We've been accepted again as a mentoring organization for Google's Summer of Code. This is the 10th year they've held it and our 10th year participating! If you're a potential mentor or student, please sign up at melange (1).
If you are interested in participating as a student please visit our page on Melange (2) to find links to our Ideas for summer projects on our wiki and our developer mailing list. As usual, please either introduce yourself on our developer mailing list or let us know what you're interested in working on this year.
Cheers, Josh
(1) http://google-melange.appspot.com/ (2) http://google-melange.appspot.com/gsoc/org2/google/gsoc2014/inkscape
Here's also a bunch of good ideas Krzysztof posted several weeks back. Some of these may be a little too ambitious to do in a summer so would need scoped down.
1. Improve Icon Cache Convert the icon cache (icon.cpp) to create the PNGs with a directory structure and index file matching the icon theme specification. Use this to get rid of customized classes InkAction, SPIcon, and so on.
2. Remove dom/ directory This directory contains strange code which is barely used. The only class which is actually used is the URI class.
3. SAX parser Convert the current document parser from DOM to SAX, so that it creates our XML tree right away, instead of creating the libxml2 DOM tree, creating our tree to match it, then freeing the libxml2 tree. This should improve performance and allow more robust fixes for some problems.
4. Rewrite of Geom::PathVector and Geom::Path Change PathVector to be a real object instead of a std::vector of Path, so that it can have useful methods, similar to curves. Move the copy-on-write idiom to the PathVector object, rather than using it in the Path. Investigate whether it is possible to store subpath data in a more compact way and make the Curve objects only convenience facades. Right now, if the path has only linear segments, every point is stored twice. Apply the following renames to match SVG terminology: Path -> Subpath PathVector -> Path
5. Boolean operations and stroking Add methods to PathVector objects: a) Set operators (& | - ^), which perform the relevant boolean operation on the paths. Use the algorithm from CGAL or devise a new robust algorithm. b) stroke(double line_width, LineJoin join, LineCap cap, double miter_limit), which performs the stroke-to-path operation. c) stroke(double line_width, LineJoin join, LineCap cap, double miter_limit, std::vector<double> const &dasharray), which performs stroke-to-path with dashing.
6. Renderer improvements This is a big task which has several sub-tasks: a) Unify the interactive and non-interactive renderers. (It would be desirable to have one codebase, but we need to investigate a little more whether this is practical.) b) Pluggable renderers - allow writing rendering backends which use something other than Cairo, e.g, OpenGL, Skia, Mozilla Azure or GEGL. c) OpenGL renderer - implement an OpenGL 3.x+ canvas which would render Beziers using this method: http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems3/gpugems3_ch25.html Investigate whether this generalizes to S-basis and circular arcs. Since the described method does not handle stroking, this work depends on 5. Also check how OpenGL path rendering is implemented in Qt, since apparently the performance there is very good. http://zrusin.blogspot.com/2011/09/nv-path-rendering.html
7. Typed XML tree Improve XML tree so that it can store some attributes in parsed, binary form. The main target of this are the data URIs used to embed images, which could be stored as binary data only. This work should be done after completing task 3 (SAX parser), as this will make it easier.
8. Shape manipulators The idea here is to rewrite shape tools in the same paradigm as the node tool. Instead of storing all information about the shape in knots which differ only by their callbacks, allow to store information in a higher-level manipulator object. This would enable things like dragging the side of a rectangle and consistent outlining / update preferences for all shapes.
9. Improve the performance of layer visibility Right now, toggling layer visibility causes massive changes in the display tree, because the entire toggled layer is invalidated at the XML level. This results in very bad performance for an action which should nearly instantaneous. Improve the control flow so that only the visibility of the object representing the layer is turned off, but the remainder of the display and object tree is leaved alone.
10. Common build system for all platforms Migrate the build system to Waf for all platforms. Alternatively, if there are important technical reasons why Waf is not suitable, port all necessary features to the CMake build system and remove Autotools.
11. Remove SPCurve SPCurve is a thin wrapper around Geom::PathVector which exists for historical reasons. Its functionality should be added to PathVector, and SPCurve should be purged.
12. Use a different data structure for Inkscape::Selection Inkscape::Selection currently uses GSList as its data structure. This is suboptimal, since a very common operation is checking whether some object is selected. Change Inkscape::Selection so that its underlying structure is a boost::multi_index container which implements the same semantics as Java's LinkedHashSet.
13. Remove all use of GList and GSList These GLib data structures are poorly designed (they are simple lists without sentinels, leading to blunders such as O(N) performance when appending to a doubly-linked list) and not type-safe. Replace all uses with standard C++ containers or suitable Boost containers.
14. Box blur Currently we always use a very accurate method to compute the Gaussian blur filter. Add an alternate method which approximates Gaussian blur using three stacked box blurs (simple averages). This is detailed in the SVG 1.1 SE specification.
15. GTK3 on Windows Rebuild the Windows devlibs so that they contain GTK3. Make the Windows port work with them, possibly sending the appropriate patches to the GTK maintainers.
16. Migrate argument parsing to GOption and remove the dependency on popt Write test cases for this bug, so that the patches can be accepted into GLib: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=522131 If this proves hard, simply apply the patch to the devlibs. Once this is done, port argument parsing to GOption.
17. Extension system improvements Refactor the extension API. Clean up the kludgy class hierarchy, possibly using multiple inheritance. Use GInputStream and GOutputStream as parameters instead of file paths, so that things like the clipboard can have
18. Robust ID handling Currently ID clash resolution is implemented as a giant switch over object types, listing every possible dependency. Replace this with virtual methods on objects, which provide information on what each object refers to. Improve behavior when a dependency of an object is deleted, and when IDs are changed / deleted from the XML editor.