Dear inkscape developers,

Our meeting this week is as follows.

Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Attending: Martin, Marc, René, Jonathan Next date: September 28th

Martin wanted to try populating a "Roadmap" which documents in the meeting what the developer team as a whole is doing. This is an effort that KDE uses to encourage contributors and gives them a way to know what's important to the whole project, even if people can work on anything they like to. The way this would work is to have a graphic in the meeting with he roadmap and some space to draw. Jonathan thinks this kind of thing can go on our website too, with the idea that we can frame it as a direction of travel for the whole project and what we'd like to be able to do in the future.

Release for 1.4 release candidate. Marc, Martin and Rene talked about the issues still outstanding and what kind of risk we would be taking. Everyone present was happy enough with the quality of the beta3 to continue with the rc schedule: Wednesday September 25th for the RC, this is the last day for any extensions patches. October 7th is the last day for translations, and October 9th is the scheduled date for release.

Rene and Marc talked about a window packaging bug which adds windows CRLF end lines to all text files in the repository, this should be fixed so the release no longer shows up as a custom version. Martin wanted to embody the user's needs by saying that having a custom string in the version shouldn't block or delay the release. Marc has a patch for 1.4.x which solves the problem with gitattributes, although this doesn't cover all future cases so René we continue researching the problem.

Marc has made a new process for submitting translations and it's currently in testing. And this is how it works:

For each Release, we create a single merge request in gitlab targeting that branch. For example 1.4.x. This merge request is the URL we send to translators, who can then submit their translations to the merge request by creating a new comment with the po file attached. Marc has made a system which consumes the comments, adds them as a new commit to the merge request with a credit to the author and then submits a reply comment with the total statistics so users can see if they have submitted correctly.

When ready, the translations will be merged into the branch. This can be done multiple times, so we can progressively add translations for betas and release candidates as we move alone the process.

The 1.4.x and master branches will be tested and the translation team will be brought in to make sure everything is set up and working correctly and the new system works as a contributor experience. Marc will ask Maren to compile a message for the translations team at the weekend when this live test will be ready to deploy.

Jonathan Sent an email to the SFC on the hiring team for the Adobe Illustrator file format and is waiting to hear back.

Marc and Jonathan talk about Hactoberfest, it's a way to get first time contributors into open source development; if they contribute a certain number of commits then they get a t-shirt. Except this year, there's no more t-shirts. They have decent ways of dealing with spam so we can add the tag. Marc already added the tag and we part of the program now. spam and accepted tags allow us to tag things positively and negatively. All contributions are welcome, not just code. Because they've ran out of t-shirts we should fund our own.

We need to order some t-shits so that we can have them for this event, but also for other things. Martin will make some generic t-shirts and ask for reimbursement if the project decides to fund them, he says that he can use them for his own supporters and projects if not so there's no risk either way.

Martin talked about the color stuff and including capypdf into inkscape directly with the C++, Marc recommended including the library as a submodule and gave instructions for how to do this using mason. The gtkmm4 build is an instructive example.

Martin explored the developer survey results so far; 21 people responded, the survey will be kept open another week for any stranglers to add their thoughts to it. We'll document the final results after that.

Thanks to everyone who came to today's meeting.