Developer Meeting notes for Feb 22nd 2023
by Martin Owens
Attending: Marc, Martin, NPJ, Nicco, Johnathan, René, pbs, Mikekov
The next developer meeting is 2nd March 2023:
https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/
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How the bug accelerator program is going (Martin)
Bug list for 1.3 is being used
https://gitlab.com/groups/inkscape/-/milestones/11 developer should add
the milestone 1.3 if they want issues to be in the mix. The advantage
is that this list provides a sorted and updated list and so the blocker
issue has been closed and instead people should mark issues as blocker
using the tag.
Lots of bugs fixed and lots of merge requests are now open waiting for
review. When Rafael becomes available merge requests will have a
reviewer to move code faster.
On the effectiveness side; Martin says other paid contracts have been
re-scheduled so time is available to work on Inkscape issues, so it's
functioning as intended to create time for inkscape at this early
stage. Though this is a self-reported data point.
A new blog is available to contributors. This will be used to report on
work done in the bug accelerator program, but can be used by other
contributors if they want to talk about their work and have it
available on the inkscape website. Please contact the web admin for
access.
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The recent Cairo rendering failure is related to Marc's dithering
patch. It was suspected that it was just related to using an updated
version of cairo, but the patch itself is implicated and Marc things
it's becuse of the way the dithering code throws an error which pbs
says will cause the whole rendering stack to then reject any other
rendering instructions.
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A Pango problem that has appeared is an upstream issue with the
fontconfig backend. To fix this the version is restricted to 1.50.11
for all builds and the windows build is pinned to 1.50.11 for now. The
issue has been reported to upstream although they say they can't
guarentee a fix.
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A version suffix was added to inkscape's library file (*.so, *.dll etc)
this allows the library file to be placed in predictable places and
should make it easier to create C++ extensions which can link against
the Inkscape library of a specific version despite not having a stable
API. Getting these library files into the right system directories to
make them useful is a possible task, as well as providing header files
or a -dev type package to allow developers to work without building the
entire of inkscape first.
- This causes a problem for macOS builds that didn't expect the
version to be there. but René is working on a packaging fix.
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Mikekov is working on a few features and improvements, mostly UI
related fixes. A new milestone has been created by Marc so anything
that we don't expect to make it into 1.3 can be tagged for the next
release and not merged by accident before the branching date.
Marc asks if the font collections feature is ready? It needs to be
rebuilt, but looks to have problems and may need to be posponed. The
original developer may also not be available.
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What kind of plan should we have for Gtk4 migration? After the 1.3
branch (or release) we will allow much more riskier code merges that
progress us towards Gtk4 support. So master is expected to break more
often, but we want to make sure Inkscape compiles so any changes will
still be expected to compile even if they cause large bugs. Having this
high risk development policy after the release is most ideal and sets
expectations in the whole developer team about what we need to be
focusing on.
Jonathon is creating a paid contract to hiring people to work on the
Gtk4 transition, please join him on rocket chat to look at the proposal
draft and see what kind of paid work we need to ask for in order to
push hard on getting Gtk4 transition done with the smallest amount of
disruption it's possible to have in our development cycle.
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We were concerned that Nicco had not recieved the contract for the AI
importer work. But Nicco was available at the meeting and has recieved
the contract. Next is signing it and sending back to the SFC, and
Johnathan is organising a date to do onboarding with Martin.
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The Hackfest is coming up very shortly. There's ongoing discussions
with the SFC and René regarding paying for the venue costs upfront so
the particpants won't have to pay the large fees that will be due at
the end. We are told Karren was unavailable so there may be some delays
reviewing the venue contract and sorting out the payment. Though we do
want to make sure this happens because we don't have a lot of time now.
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We are accepted into the GSoC program, number of applicants isn't set
yet. You may advertise about our particpation in GSoc 2023, and please
make sure to update the list of projects on the wiki
https://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code
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We looked at three of the oldest merge requests as part of our regular
end of meeting activity: One was assigned to Adam (sorry adam!), two
were closed as out of date.
Thanks for coming everyone!
Best Regards, Martin Owens
3 months
