Meeting minutes 2017 11 16

Attendance: George Bina, Radu Coravu, Kris Eberlein, Robert Anderson, John Pashley, Eric Sirois, Bill Gamboa, Lief Erickson, Roger Sheen

Item 1: Any updates about prior releases?

Any patches planned or other concerns about 2.X? Will likely have at least one more patch for 2.5 but nothing in the works yet.

DITA-OT 3.0 is now a prior release: first patch expected end of this month.

Item 2: DITA-OT 3.1 Development status and updates

Can we really be looking at 3.1 already? Nothing in progress yet and not really expecting much activity until January.

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

Major restructuring of docs made it into 3.0 release - replacing the original book-oriented navigation with a task based navigation, switching from "user guide + dev guide" to "Installing, Publishing, ..." Based on work from Shane Taylor and Misti Pinter, with Roger doing a lot to help clean up and get it in right before release. Expecting cleanup in 3.0.1 but major work is there + done. One cleanup item is likely to move files because the folder names still reflect the book structure - means that if you bookmark 3.0 topics deep in the docs, those could change, best to wait for 3.0.1 where they should become stable long term.

Roger is very busy with adding other content into 3.0.1 level docs and deserves a nice break for December after it comes out.

Item 4: DITA-OT Day wrap-up

Recordings are now available: https://www.oxygenxml.com/events/2017/dita-ot_day.html

Day seemed to go well. Robert thinks it was a lot of Robert/Jarno/Roger talking, Robert would like to hear more what other people are doing.

John asks about more specifics on how to contribute. For hobby or full-time programmers in particular - if you want to play with the code, the best way to start is to find a bug that looks interesting in the issues tracker and submit a pull request: https://github.com/dita-ot/dita-ot/issues

Reminder: best to start small. Better for everybody if their first pull requests are on the small side, to get used to the way the project works, rather than starting with a 1000 line new feature that needs heavy review or rework. General contribution guidelines here: http://www.dita-ot.org/contributing

George and Radu: felt this year was a bit less demanding on the organization side because didn't do live stream, so had more time for other parts of the day. Recordings all worked well and are posted on event page. Going through survey results - generally good feedback, concerns (about DITA-OT) include faster processing time, CSS based PDF, fixes for old issues.

Again raise discussion of hackathon - and the usual issues of the difficulties of doing this + getting the right audience when there is such a small developer pool / group of interested people. Docs? High-level onboarding? Deep dive into hacking code?

Kris comments - if we want to have a wider variety of presentations / more presenters, have to work on that a lot sooner.

Item 5: Other topics

Expecting a slowdown in December - after the big rush to get things into 3.0, Jarno and Roger expecting to take a hiatus in December after 3.0.1 comes out. Robert also has a lot of time off planned for next week + during December.

Planning to cancel the December contributor call which would be just a couple weeks out from now; will resume with normally scheduled meetings in January.

Item 6: Backlog discussion

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