Meeting minutes 2018 01 04

Attendance: George Bina, Radu Coravu, Jarno Elovirta, Roger Sheen, Robert Anderson, John Pashley, Lief Erickson, Shane Taylor, Leigh White, Eric Sirois, Bill Gamboa

Item 1: Any updates about prior releases?

Nothing in schedule (yet?) as a patch for 2.5.

Several issues opened since 3.0 release, most against 3.0 or 3.0.1: https://github.com/dita-ot/dita-ot/issues?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+created%3A%3E%3D2017-10-30

Robert working on several; focus should really be on the higher priority items (mostly null pointer errors) rather than the one Robert fixed last night / this morning for reltable headers ... got distracted with that one.

Would welcome help from others though.

Radu also points out - should get the German fix from Stefan (Roger will review) and the Eclipse Help JAR update.

Lief asks about branch filtering problems that predate 3.0 -- #2576 is one. Spent a few days trying to refactor content to avoid branch filtering because of these bugs.

Radu has reported a couple of issues against the markdown / html parsers as well. The one against HTML may already be fixed in 3.0 (may have been an issue with 2.5 level plugins).

Where / when / how to do more promotion of 3.0? Most news from dev team has been on twitter or at DITA-OT Day, which misses much of the audience. Should do a stronger push after 3.0.2 comes out, with expectation it will fix some of the NPE errors. Our user community is often not quick to upgrade anyway, those that tend to upgrade quickly are mostly on this call.

Item 2: DITA-OT 3.1 Development status and updates

Nothing in plan at the moment - focus has been on backlog, 3.0, 2.x.

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

Roger and Jarno are meeting today (in person!!!) and working on some longstanding issues with doc builds and website. Set up some linting and code formatting tools for project website; also helps with staging of commits, ensuring new items adhere to conventions.

Another longstanding issue that's been fixed: Algolia doc search now running on OT docs. Started work last year and had to pause, but with some help from Algolia and Jarno, got it debugged today and updated. Search is much improved, lots of other OS tools / docs use this search engine.

Also resolves an issue Lief had opened late last year, that the older search was broken + returning old results.

Item 4: Other topics

DITA-OT Day? After last one, had some discussions about 2018. Do we continue, in that format? Is it useful to the attendees / can we get audience more involved? Have had regular suggestions for hackathon + workshop type activities. Haven't done in the past largely because of logistics, didn't want to have a whole second day alongside DITA-OT day. So one idea: part of day on presentations (what's new, etc), and part of day with "bring your own issue", or "I want to contribute but how do I start on this item".

Jarno's concern with that: it's always possible a single issue can take 6 hours to fix. Hard to go through multiple issues of interest to multiple people - hard to keep interest.

Another idea: greater focus on lightning talks, let people vote on what they find interesting? Could also do same with list of issues to focus on, or have groups of people working on different issues, with contributors in room to moderate / help. Based on past, main fear is too many users (as opposed to developers), so won't have people who want to work on issues. Could also encourage companies to send their developers instead.

Could do something like Lavacon did in the past - have people vote on sessions they'd like to hear. But have to decide whether this is up to everyone, or if you must register in order to vote. Robert wonders whether votes like that serve more as PR than as actual agenda-setting (which is not a bad thing!) -- meaning that by having the vote, speakers do their own PR for the conference by asking people to go read the agenda + vote.

To encourage new speakers - one idea could be to have anonymous votes - you're voting on the session title + abstract without the speaker name. Good way for larger conferences to attract new / under-represented voices; unsure how well this would work in a smaller venue with smaller list of choices. Also have the issue that people will say "Go vote for my session X". But is still a good thing to consider for other people voting.

Regardless - if this is going to happen this year, we want / need to start encouraging topic ideas (what do people want to hear AND what do people want to present) ASAP.

Item 5: Backlog discussion

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

Radu's got a good starter list for backlog discussion of important issues that are still open (or were as of this meeting, one is closed and crossed out): https://github.com/dita-ot/dita-ot/issues/2528

Reminder: if you want to scroll through the backlog on your own looking for things to test out or fix, the labels provide a good way to narrow things down. For example, bugs related to chunking (which should never be your first point of entry but shows a nice collection): https://github.com/dita-ot/dita-ot/issues?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=is%3Aopen+label%3Apreprocess%2Fchunking+label%3Abug