Meeting minutes 2018 04 05

Attendance: Robert, Roger, George, Jarno, Eric Sirois, Lief Erickson, John Pashley

Item 1: Any updates about prior releases?

3.0.4 patch planned; several items collected but not too much at this point: https://github.com/orgs/dita-ot/projects/4

Question about PDF customizations, possibly related to catalog files. Should go into 3.0.4 - have a number of people commenting on it so likely to hit it. Pushing out 3.0.4 without it would probably not be good idea.

Will not enforce our usual 3-week rule -- want to wait for 3.0.4 until config files fixed.

PDF2 has traditionally used catalog files to resolve configuration files with cfg:; used to be the only thing that used catalog files like that. Later, plugin; URI scheme was added to get files in other plugins. cfg: still there. Don't think we use them in our docs build and don't have int tests for PDF (config file not found would still get you a PDF).

Need to dig into this to figure out the full cause, address for future.

Item 2: DITA-OT 3.1 Development status and updates

3.1 project board: https://github.com/orgs/dita-ot/projects/1

• Roger asks: do we still want to have 3.1 major release mid-year, or given the slower velocity of the project right now, do we hold it for later in the year?
• Jarno: have thought about this. Prefer to release often but understand if people want to hold off. Perhaps if doc has been redone in major way?
• Roger: can't promise big doc changes.
• Roger: what do vendors think?
• Leif: from an end user perspective: if I were using 1.8 or 2.x, and 3.1 was current in Oxygen vs 3.0, I wouldn't care that I missed 3.0.
• Jarno: we do have some "proper" fixes in 3.1 that couldn't go into 3.0 without doing some sort of workaround
• Robert: probably make decision in next month's meeting; if plan would be end of may or start of June, by next meeting, we should know if we have any real features worth a release
• Jarno: reminder we have a bunch of "good first bug" things in the project board that others could come in and help out with

Specifics in plan or being considered for 3.1:

• Robert has some ideas for simplifying PDF overrides - likely as pull request next week
• Robert considering a feature to count degrees-from-map: we currently follow every link we find, forever. Map links to topic links to topic links to ... [times 30]. Have run into tangled content where we only ever publish 100 topics, but the build pulls in 1,000. Idea: parameter to stop at X degrees from map.
• Jarno working on stuff that are interesting to him but not sure others will notice. One idea, what is the correct order for asset / image processing; would like to change so that preprocess does not decide what files are copied to output, make it the responsibility of the transformation type. Might cause breakage for custom transtypes that rely on preprocess to handle; not sure if we could do it in a way that the defaults change but custom transtypes get the old behavior

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

• Set up 3.0.4 hotfix branch, cherry picks a few items from develop
• Jarno suggested a while back: may want to consider adding date info about our releases, to download page or release notes or both. Seems like a good idea but would want it unobtrusive. Helps give an indication of how old releases are, discourage update of new installations of 1.8; also gives good impression of project activity (can easily see twice-yearly releases for several years now).
• JS or JQuery for pages that need updates - Jarno notes jquery is pretty good at maintaining Semver numbering, so updating to latest hotfix of currently used version is likely easy/safe. Roger will try it out.
• Several forks to docs / website repositories lately by an unknown organization - that came from Roger's class, asking students to do exercise with indexing and they're forking our docs to try.

Item 4: DITA-OT Day

DITA Europe has officially picked Rotterdam, Netherlands, so that's where it is if we are up against that conference.

• Jarno had an idea for a talk - he's been working on a process that rewrites element rules to work with elements rather than @class, which improves performance, but also requires work up front to modify the elements too. Very technical but could improve performance for some. Jarno promises it works even for cases with lots of values in @class.
• Need to get more public activity, input, and feedback soon if we are going to hold it this year.
• CIDM's North America conference is in Denver this month; those attending can make sure to promote or discuss DITA-OT Day as well as DITA-OT 3.0

Item 5: Backlog discussion

Project boards: Project boards: https://github.com/orgs/dita-ot/projects/

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