Working on Inkscape
Our team is working on a free and open-source graphical editor called
InkScape licensed under Gnome General
Public License. One of the main features of this project is that it is
mainly used for editing vector images. SVG and PDF
are some examples of their formats. According to Wikipedia, "Vector graphics are
computer graphics images that are defined in terms of 2D points, which are
connected by lines and curves to form polygons and other shapes". Unlike
bitmap images, they do not consist of dots, so you don't see blurred
squares when you enlarge the photo. That's cool. I thought only Adobe
editors were used for this purpose, since I barely use graphical editors.
Building and Running
This project is hosted on GitLab, and it is my first time using it. I registered
to it first and did some configurations like adding my ssh public key. Then, I
cloned the repo and started following the instructions. The instructions have a
script that is supposed to install all the dependencies, if
your OS distribution is supported. Since I am using a distribution derived from
Ubuntu, it should work fine, but it didn’t. I looked at the script and found out
that it does not actually support distributions derived from the ones
listed in the script if the ID in /etc/os-release has their own distribution
name. You can refer this directive. Anyway, I
modified the script locally, changing the ID to my distribution. I just didn’t
want to see the string 'missing dependencies' on bootstrap as I did hundred
times in this LibreOffice evaluation. Now that Cmake
successfully generated a Makefile, it was time to build the project by running
make. This time, I tried running with a built-in Linux command called time
to see total build time because I missed how long building LibreOffice took,
which has almost 10 million lines of code. Too sad I fall asleep after
waiting for four hours. By the way, default logs of Cmake look really nice. They
are colored and output percentages that show progress next to every compilation
step. When the process is done, the output of time says the execution took
6374 seconds which is about 106 minutes. I installed the binaries by make
install and executed make check to see if the build has been done right. The
output of make check says:
97% tests passed, 2 tests failed out of 69
Total Test time (real) = 15.17 sec
The following tests FAILED:
35 - cli_export_type_check_output (Failed)
53 - cli_export_xaml_check_output (Failed)
I don’t know what those messages mean. Let’s try running the executable,
install_dir/bin/inkscape. It opens a pretty window and looks to be working
properly, at least for now.
Which Issues To Work On?
-
Translation
I was thinking about mainly doing translation, but it looks like most of the Japanese translations have been already done. I will keep an eye on this though. -
Website Development
The project uses Django as its primary framework. I worked on the framework for my capstone project. It can be a good choice for brushing up my skills in it. -
Build System
The build system is one of my interest as well. I enjoy writing Bash Scripts, Makefile and CMake(All of these are pretty simple stuff…). Also, I don’t think this is a choice for a newbie like me, but I will keep reading the documentation and issues on this.
Outside Activity
- Open Street Map:
I added my family’s favorite drug store in my home town. The name of the place is “CREATE”, but pronounced as “curieito”.