Meeting minutes 2013 02 26

DITA-OT Contributor meeting, Feb 26 2013

Attendance: Robert Anderson, Jarno Elovirta, George Bina, Radu Corvu, Julio Vasquez, Jim Tivy, Eric Sirois, Kris Eberlein (Regrets: Eliot Kimber)

Item 1: Milestone 1 update

Jarno removed a lot of deprecated code. Robert noted that Ant was not included in the "full easy install" package - should have been there. Problem in the updated build script; Jarno will fix for M2.

Note that this was originally planned to be the M2 release date, but M1 on original date not released due to lack of time and lack of new content.

Item 2: Plans for next milestone

Robert: new doc item just opened for developers, to list non-DITA changes made during preprocess.

Jarno: moved "generate list" function from Java code to Ant code. Seems cleaner. Other items for this milestone: no plans yet.

Julio: encountered spacing issue with nested lists in PDF, seems to have shown up in 1.7. Didn't check ordered lists, but used to be in unordered that the list marker changed (bullets, dashes, etc). Not sure what changed in that area; Robert did not touch that code, Jarno does not remember updates to list code. Ideally would be configurable (what markers to use) but likely out of scope for now. For now - check previous behavior. Spacing should be fixed. For now, Julio added attribute to correct spacing; will double check old behavior. Jarno: one problem with nested lists - if you have list items with paragraphs, with lists inside, that may throw it off. But cleaner list in list item should be straightforward.

Item 3: Other topics

Robert and Jarno discussed some future thoughts (2.0 branch to break backwards compatibility). Did not come to conclusion. Maybe have 2.0 and 1.8 out together? With backwards-incompatible, could switch to XSLT 2.0, may break some plug-ins with that, could move files around to better locations. Comments from Oxygen? They would probably have to support both, because would have people on both. Would 2.0 version be new plug-in, maybe? (Jarno: probably not). George: if primarily a transform change, schemas the same, then probably OK to support. For plug-ins, would be nice if they can identify "works from OT version X"; Jarno has wanted to add this for some years but not enabled yet; if used OSGI to configure plug-ins, it could be done. This could be part of a change to 2.0.

Jarno: part of me would like to make OT a proper OSGI Eclipse style plug-in. But that may be overkill. OT should be module you can use to create command line tool for DITA; should be usable in (for example) Oxygen; should be installable on server for use in background. Would welcome ideas for restructuring at architectural level to make this easier.

Jarno: Official support channel for DITA-OT? We accept issues at github, have support tracker at SourceForge but not really used. Primarily dita-users at yahoo today, but has problems. Should start directing people to stackoverflow? Tell them to use the Yahoo group (or replacement)? Kris and Robert suggest it's premature to push people to a specific spot - hoping Yahoo group issues are resolved (or new destination found) very quickly.

Hosting binaries of DITA-OT: it is strange to keep them at SourceForge when we are not using SF for anything other than binaries and website. Github does not offer a way to host binaries. Can do website there. Robert: it is odd, but not pressing right now, so do not see pressure to move right now. Jarno: also, other hosting sites like Amazon charge (even if cheap). We use Travis for testing; would be nice to hook that up someway to auto-upload nightly packages.