Meeting minutes 2018 06 07

Attendance: George Bina, John Pashley, Robert Anderson, Jarno Elovirta, Roger Sheen, Eliot Kimber, Frank Wegmann

Item 1: Any updates about prior releases?

Still nothing planned for 2.x. Another hotfix to 3.0 seems unlikely with 3.1 ready and few (if any) compatibility issues between those releases.

Item 2: DITA-OT 3.1 Development status and updates

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

Release is effectively complete, frozen for new features. Last update in this morning, an update to LwDITA plugin version.

Docs: hoped to finish last night but not quite done. Caught dependency updates topic and a few related cleanup items. Expect to be able to finish off today or tomorrow. Left a couple docs items open in the hope they'd get done for 3.1, but critical features have pushed out the nice-to-have items. Expect to post draft for review tonight or tomorrow morning. If docs are done, release should be complete tomorrow.

Last bit of content wanted to do and get reviewed -- note on how to enable new logging facility for FOP. May also want to note: if you run FOP at debug level, it has an overwhelming amount of information in the log.

Release process is nearly all automated. Release page on github needs manual editing; uploading latest to Maven repo is also manual (might be possible to automate with different provider?)

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

Noticed https links on project website are hitting redirect loops - getting redirected back to http. Robert updating hover hosting settings and hopefully will resolve issues.

Item 4: DITA-OT Day

https://www.oxygenxml.com/events/2018/dita-ot_day.html

Topics to highlight in call for proposals:

• Custom plugins - creative styles or managing your own?
• Creative new output formats using DITA-OT?
• Local testing frameworks for DITA-OT customizations? How are people in larger organizations testing DITA-OT?
• Using DITA-OT as a component in larger work flow?
• How do you distribute DITA-OT in a large organization / how do you run it, who manages that?
• How do you manage DITA-OT in a small organization? What skills do you feel are required to keep it operating?
• Is your team newer to DITA-OT and have experiences you could share?
• Has anyone tried using DITA-OT and LwDITA to publish mixed content from both writers and developers?

Frank points out that the organization size is tough to categorize and maybe not useful. Could be a small team using DITA-OT in a giant company. Could be medium sized company but everyone in company is using it. Jarno points out that deployment is the thing - if you're a team of 2 but deploying to 9,000 then that's quite substantial.

Robert will try to draft a call for proposals using the themes above and send to George today.

Item 5: Other topics

Any chance we could come up with a theme for next release? Looking back, we can say 3.1 focused on some cool features around code blocks and a nice collection of PDF fixes, but there's not a big thing to sell the release. Hard to promise a specific theme for a release in a small open source volunteer group, but it would be nice to have one if we could manage it. Could focus on an area of the backlog that we want to try to focus on.

What's solid enough in DITA 2.0 that we could think about it?

Main thing is chunking: new design is approved, though still has to write up spec language.

Multimedia domain is also done: supporting in DITA-OT should be near trivial for HTML, possibly simple for PDF as well, so could add that but most of the work will be on implementations to integrate the domain.

Next meeting would normally be July 5, but will hit US vacation time right against the July 4 holiday. Planning to shift by a week and have meeting on July 12.

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.