Meeting minutes 2014 07 01

Attendance: George, Radu, Kris, Robert, Eliot, Roger

Item 1: 1.8 release status

1.8.4 still the latest version posted. Have a few fixes in 1.8.5 stream but haven't planned a fixpack yet.

DITA-OT 2.0 status and updates

Robert about to start playing in the land of PDF2.

DITA-OT day in Munich

Registration page available: http://www.oxygenxml.com/events/2014/dita-ot_day.html

Questions from last meeting:

• What do we want in talks? Start with intro, at least one "under the hood" about development, what else?
• Now making progress on agenda: setting up slots, lightning talks - Robert and Jarno both to give talks.
• George's preference: talks about open source items (tools that use the OT, or plug-ins). Lightning talk section can have commercial tools talk about their use of the OT. Prefer not to have 30 or 45 min on commercial tool.
• Need something on customizing PDF, that is the most requested item on Oxygen support list.
• Maybe a panel of vendors talking about how they use the OT?
• Also have general preference for open source, but maybe just use that as a preference, while not ruling out presentations of other cool customizations.
• Idea from Roger: how do you pull in the latest OT from github, use it as part of version control / automated builds? Would be a nice thing to hear about.
• George: looking at tool of publishing PDF with CSS, something he has been playing with and plans to give out; could also talk about that. Can donate to DITA-OT or as separate open source tool, Radu could present at DITA-OT day
• Robert would be happy to speak on the history (not sure how much interest there is, in the past has been very interesting to very specific set of people). More interesting talk would be how-to on plugins, which went over very well in 2011 and became a popular set of slides, needs to be updated considerably for 2014
• First session needs to be general introduction to DITA-OT for those who are new - want to make sure novices are welcome, having it first is important, allows those who know the basics to show up a bit later
• Something about RelaxNG? Not sure of how that fits with DITA-OT, it's sort of an OASIS thing, probably will be a separate github repository (not part of DITA-OT core)
• Find marketing channels: update DITA-OT web page to mention it, mailing lists, already listed on CIDM page about DITA Europe, Oxygen website.
• How to decide which submissions to accept
• How to try and ensure that those who register show up - will help to have most of agenda in place when asking people to sign up.

Doc updates and plans

Need to have a list of doc impacts from 2.0 so far (this milestone and previous).

https://github.com/dita-ot/dita-ot/wiki/Backlog-for-the-DITA-OT-documentation

Need to add: AH updates Kris found last month

Other topics?

Eliot: seems to be some difference between dost.jar in 1.8 and earlier ones - if run integrator with 1.8 code and 1.7 jar, get null pointer error. Always running through Eclipse, and need to tell eclipse "here is dost.jar", but was still pointing to 1.7 Jar when using 1.8 code.

Bunch of discussion about how to collect plugins, make them available. Eliot has dita-community organization at github, as a way to collect available plugins, but hasn't put much effort into it. Biggest issue with anything like that is maintenance, pruning out old info that is out of date, etc. Main reason that DITA-OT project itself doesn't want to maintain a repository for other folks' plugins.

Discussion from Roger about creating images of the released code. Goal: be able to compare or check out branches (what changed from 1.7 to 1.8.2) without the noise of all the intermediate checkins; be able to check out any release to change what you're using, without the intermediate dev stages. Similar goal to Maven, but want to do it in a way that stays in line with project. Best is if person doing it has plan to maintain it and participate in the project (such as by attending this regular meeting).

Roger: A dedicated distribution repo would make it easier for people, organizations & vendors to merge upstream changes into their own OT installations used in production environments. This repo could be cloned to add the OT to existing projects as a Git submodule or subtree (rather than unpacking a zip file). This is difficult to do using current main OT repo layout (required tools like Ant are missing, extra items like Java source code & test suites are not required in production environments.) Branches for standard, minimal & full-easy-install packages and tags for each official release would make it very easy to switch OT versions in place via git checkout.