Meeting minutes 2018 05 03

Attendance: George Bina, Robert Anderson, John Pashley, Eric Sirois, Lief Erickson, Jarno Elovirta, Roger Sheen, Frank Wegmann

Item 1: Any updates about prior releases?

Discuss plan for 3.0.4 hotfix: new message showing up in 3.0.4 that will probably concern people so think we likely should hold until that's fix. This is a side effect of the PDF2 fix for catalogs -- allowing for no catalog now results in a confusing "no catalog" error. Jarno tried to track down the code for the catalog resolver itself, but google took him to a link to an SVN repo that returns a 404 error, which means we're probably relying on catalog code that is more or less abandoned. There's new catalog code that Norm Walsh has been working of for years now, it didn't go into Apache project but may be better to move to that instead of the older catalog processor that's shipped with Xerces.

It's a bug in the catalog resolver, but we can't fix that because we can't even find the source, so easiest fix is probably to work around it in our code. Can probably do this by removing catalogmanager.properties completely, just need to verify nothing else breaks. Jarno will create a pull request.

Have a few open pull requests for the patch to validate - but that's probably it, and should release the patch once catalog issue is resolved.

Item 2: DITA-OT 3.1 Development status and updates

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

Not too much there apart from bug fixes - but a lot of those are in 3.0 hotfixes. Original thought was 3.1 around end of may to allow for time to work on 3.2.

Robert's going to try and work on the "Degrees of separation" issue today if time allows. Also has a PDF simplification thing that would be nice.

Jarno still interested in coderef scheme that would let you pull in specific lines of a file while stripping out leading white space to make it cleaner. Not all of it but effectively to un-indent the pulled section. Had this thought for a while but has come up now from someone else.

From discussion about release -- plan to finalize 3.1 end of May. Will discuss over Slack as the end of the month approaches.

Question about version numbering -- should update docs to indicate we try to adhere to semantic versioning (semver) for numbering.

Item 3: Doc updates and plans

Radu opened a docs issue about an XEP parameter not showing up in our docs -- those lists in the docs are generated so not sure what was missed. Likely something that used to be in docs but didn't get added to the plugin.xml file in the XEP folder.

Few doc issues that are really more github project housekeeping.

• Downloads page now shows release dates: http://www.dita-ot.org/download
• GitHub now allows different templates for features versus bugs - may want to take a look at that
• You can now create project boards as templates - could create one of those for our use, but may need organization permissions
• Can now use bots to check project manifest / dependencies for the project page -- Roger has been trying this and could add to project https://github.com/dita-ot/dita-ot.github.io/issues/48
• So far we've shied away from having a bot that automatically closes old issues, but there's a fancier bot that works based on tags. Can tag as "need update from submitter" and then after certain time it will close if no response from submitter. https://probot.github.io/apps/no-response

GitHub recently enabled encryption for github pages -- so should use https://www.dita-ot.org in our “official” links.

Item 4: DITA-OT Day: Rotterdam

George reports: have signed agreement with same hotel that DITA Europe is hosting, on the Sunday before. Page is now live, and 3 people have registered: https://www.oxygenxml.com/events/2018/dita-ot_day.html

From John: Amsterdam is closest airport, and 25 min train ride to Rotterdam. Should add that info to event website.

Need to work on call for proposals. Would like to specifically suggest that people talk about their plugins, new / creative things they are doing to extend or manage DITA-OT. Alan had a really fun idea last week at DITA NA, George also promised to put something together. Roger suggests contacting Brian Schnabel about the XLIFF plugin to see if there is interest.

Frank suggests - maybe somebody could have a non-technical intro to plugins, why to do it and how to start? "How to create my first DITA-OT plugin" tutorial? Might be quite useful.

Deadline: open call for proposals within 2 weeks.

Item 5: Other topics

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Item 6: 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.