what was the rationale behind this MR?

I initially encountered this when optimizing small icons. Of course excess chunks could always be cleaned up in post-processing, but principle motivated me to contribute some means to control it at the source: first simply that it’s silly to write data only to immediately delete it, but more importantly that I see the current behavior as essentially injecting an ad into user data. Given that it’s for a good cause it’s a fine default, but it crosses a line when there’s no way to opt out.

scrub the fact that they are using free software […] and our CoC is fairly strong on attribution

I’d love to see Inkscape licensed under something like the AGPL so that this tenet of the CoC could be applied more broadly. Am I correct in reading that you’re considering the text chunk to be effectively a watermark which helps reveal violators? Since this is already trivially removed by anyone so motivated, its utility to this end is in that it’s enabled by default, and this MR doesn’t change that.

not sold on idea we should have this in GUI

Agreed; this is niche enough that a command line argument or environment variable might be more appropriate.

Andrew Kvalheim (24bd988a) at 02 Jun 19:10

Updated:

Andrew Kvalheim (7dedc973) at 29 May 05:21

Some options:

• software annotation
• software attribution
• software metadata
• software note
• software tag
• software text chunk
• software used

I don’t have much preference for how it’s exposed—a CLI argument, environment variable, a more obscure setting, etc.—as long as it still affects PNGs exported via the GUI. I’m currently simply patching it out but it would be nice to not have to compile Inkscape to accomplish this.

It’s not a generic comment field though; I’m only using that term for consistency with Inkscape’s source. This is actually the Software standard chunk which wouldn’t make sense for the user to edit.

I noticed that PNGs created by Inkscape contain a “made by Inkscape comment”:

$ pnginfo 'example.png'
[…]
  Number of text strings: 1
    Software (xTXt deflate compressed): www.inkscape.org

This isn’t always appropriate so I looked for an option to omit it but didn’t see one. I’ve drafted this:

I don’t really know what I’m doing though so critical review is more than welcome.

Andrew Kvalheim (39fb0ece) at 20 May 21:41

Andrew Kvalheim (4f261851) at 20 May 21:41

Andrew Kvalheim (4f261851) at 20 May 17:09

... and 503 more commits