Meeting minutes 2011 04 05

April 5, 2011 (Start of 1.5.3 Milestone 5)

Attendees: Robert Anderson, Jarno Elovirta, Reuven Weiser, Rob Justice

Item #1: Developer wiki

Based on earlier discussion - Robert will activate MediaWiki and set up the front page, along with minutes from this and past meetings. The wiki is intended only for developer oriented information; general user information should go into the shipped user guide, or onto the dita.xml.org wiki. For users that find the page from a search, we should try to make it easy to discover better resources.

Item #2: Milestone 4

Released last Friday; no further comment

Item #3: Plans for Milestone 5

• Reuven: hope to add PDF flagging. Have gone over the code; need to submit to Git repository. Once the wiki is active, Jarno plans to add instructions on Git commits.
• Reuven: have seen the requests for table / figure lists in PDF. Probably cannot get that into Milestone 5, but hope for Milestone 6.
• Jarno: would like to complete FOP 1.0 integration. Added to Milestone 4, but removed due to memory issues in one environment. Need to work with Jason to track down issues.
• Jarno: will probably continue work on Java code cleanup.
• Robert: working on design for better preservation of metadata when merging maps.

Other items

• Jarno investigated use of Ivy or Maven to manage our dependencies on other tools. Unlikely to use them at present (they contain older versions of the libraries we use).
• Discussion of how people call the build today - with Ant, Java, or otherwise.
  • Robert notes that people use all types. IF NOT USING AN EXTERNAL TOOL OR GUI: the best strategy is to use an Ant build dedicated to each unique build. Some tools create wrappers to the Java command line, which is itself just a wrapper to Ant. Some tools call build.xml with parameters. Some tools create unique Ant builds and then run them. Robert considers that the ideal method.
  • Rob suggests adding a topic about the pros/cons of each method into the Quick Start Guide. General agreement.
  • Jarno notes that calling the Java interface with no parameters returns a list of parameters; would like to add a similar set of help for the Ant interface. For now could focus on the most important ones like args.input and transtype.
  • Jarno: question was prompted by need for multiple instances in a single Virtual Machine. The Java interface uses static variables that prevent this. May need to document that the Java command line is for single-threaded use only. Still need to remove some static variables from pre-process; after that, no reason to avoid multiple instances in one VM when using Ant interface.

Category:1.5.3 Category:Meeting_minutes