Meeting minutes 2013 12 03

Attendance: Robert Anderson, George Bina, Radu Coravu, Graham Hay, Frank Ralf, Matt Kaatman, Steven Calderwood, Kris Eberlein, Jarno Elovirta

Current release: 1.8.3 package accumulating items

Several fixes checked in. Eric Sirois also wants to ensure latest XSDs are included (fixed versions from OASIS). Plan to release this month. Kris will send Jarno the latest.

DITA-OT 2.0

Development continues, primarily from Jarno.

Jarno: Had discussion at github about plug-in installation. Old way: unzip into plugins. Jarno added convenience function that unzips for you. As in "dita --install path/to/zip" (similar for uninstall). Eliot thought that should be the way for users to install. Old way still works, no problems, but may be easier to tell people this way. Will be a big doc item as well. Seems a good idea. Once we get a package, would like more feedback on this "dita" tool to run builds.

D4P: Steven may be able to help bring that up to a level where Eliot is comfortable bundling.

RTF updates from Frank: trying to update only features that Frank is familiar with in RTF. Current version 1.7 or 1.8? But Frank is focusing on 1.5, the version he's most familiar with, so should be working with older processors.

ODT: Graham hoping to work on it. Timeline - summer holiday coming up in NZ, may have some quality time coming up. Probably will take a couple of months to come up to speed on everything. Advice from Robert - strip out all flagging code. Primary motiviation: have a desire to generate artifacts which need to be presented, typically in PDF, but also clients want Microsoft format, to continue development after the fact.

General idea of release date? Not at the moment. "Future" -- one big goal, need to get Windows issues worked out. Want to get the first milestone soon.

Status update on OASIS DITA 1.3

Most items fully approved by OASIS at this point (lot of progress over the last few months). Can begin prototyping in the 2.0 branch. Likely want to have a plug-in for the 1.3 Doctypes, only used if documents explicitly refer to 1.3 version.

Main items of interest? RelaxNG - interest from George. Goal is that DITA-OT should be able to use any version - RNG, DTD, XSD - to use RNG, need to use the code from the DITA-NG project.

Other items

Graham: who is the best go-to person to communicate with? dita-ot-dev list is best place to start, and also gets things on record for people taking the same path in the future.

Frank: how to contribute to documentation? Read that doc is in DITA, so can't contribute in a wiki? Stored in docsrc/ directory at github. If interest in any specific part of docs, best to speak with Kris; she also has a small backlog of doc items if looking for things to help out with.