Meeting minutes 2017 02 02

Attendance: Radu Coravu, Robert Anderson, Lief Erickson, Leigh White, Roger Sheen, Kris Eberlein

Item 1: Any updates about prior releases?

2.4.3 released last weekend.

Have likely several things lined up for 2.4.4; branch is now created. At least one pull request should be ready for merging.

Item 2: DITA-OT Development status and updates

2.5: Discussion of "legacypdf" changes - all agree that this change is really needed, and if we can get info to Leigh quickly it can be added as a note in her upcoming book. Note that her book will still be necessary for anybody on 2.4 or earlier. If Jarno is still interested in this approach - should go into 2.5 (not hold for 3.0). Not earth shaking changes, as Roger puts it.

There is a pull request open -- further discussion should happen here: https://github.com/dita-ot/dita-ot/pull/2519

3.0:

Item 3: Doc updates and plans, update on documentation call

Several recent updates around properties files; Roger journeyed all the way to Helsinki to pick Jarno's brain and find out all the details, get them well documented. http://www.dita-ot.org/dev/parameters/configuration-properties.html

Question about the tutorial on creating a CSS plugin - anybody else able to reproduce the issue Robert found (originally reported on dita-ot-user)? Roger will try it out - Robert's last head-scratching idea is that it might be a Windows issue, creating non-XML files with Explorer and then making them XML? https://github.com/dita-ot/dita-ot/issues/2583

Robert speculates - maybe would be a good idea to not use the name build.xml in your plugin Ant file? Robert has always named Ant XML files based on what the plugin is doing - in this case, it would have resulted in a clear message from the plugin install process. It clearly should not be necessary. Just my preference -- "myBuild.xml" or "exampleBuild.xml" or "pluginid-build.xml" would have given a clear message here, and for Robert, is an easier way to think about these (don't like having 50 build.xml files).

Others on the call have always used build.xml and don't have any problems keeping it straight - seems to be the more common convention.

Ongoing issue about search engines for dita-ot.org site -- still working on it, no changes yet.

Item 4: Other topics

From last month: posting binaries of old releases. Robert uploaded many early ones, when a tag carried over from CVS clearly lined up with the release date. Got to a point where they no longer lined up so neatly; will continue uploading but make new "releases", and upload the CVS source zip along with the binaries. After discussion - probably only makes sense to upload "full easy install" when old packages have multiple versions. Anybody who wants just the "minimal" version at this point can download the full package and remove JAR files; it would be difficult to go the other way now, download 5 or 8 year old code and then also find the old external JAR files that it needs (and cannot see when this would be useful / necessary).

Item 5: Backlog discussion

Time to go through pull requests, issues tracker, determine how to handle open issues.