Meeting minutes 2018 07 12

Attendance: Robert Anderson, Roger Sheen, Jarno Elovirta, Lief Erickson, Radu Coravu, Frank Wegmann, John Pashley

Item 1: Any updates about prior releases?

3.1.1 hotfix branch is open. Jarno would prefer to release soon-ish. Project board: https://github.com/orgs/dita-ot/projects/6

Robert put a minor fix into troff repo, should update the pointer to grab that.

Target for release: early next week, Roger and Jarno to work out release notes / finalize hotfix.

Item 2: DITA-OT 3.next Development status and updates

3.2 project board: https://github.com/orgs/dita-ot/projects/5

Not much in there at this point. Have several items in TODO column on board, available for anyone to work on. Mostly pulled forward from 3.1 project board. Not sure if this is misleading and makes people think that something is going in / is being actively worked on.

Backlog keeps growing. The P1 / P2 / P3 tags are really there to indicate severity, not priority, meaning we don't have an easy way to say "these are the highest priority items". Radu has an issue with a good list of higher priority items.

Jarno took another look at out-of-the-box support for RelaxNG; issue is that Jing doesn't actually have a release to support it. Pull request is out there from George but project is not very active so don't see that going in. Means either we try to get George to merge those changes, or we fork the project.

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

Not much at this point due to vacations. Several nice-to-have items on docs tracker but not for 3.1.1.

Lief working on DITA-OT site survey as semester project. Quick survey asking about how docs are used, find out about engagement, ask questions about whether people want video. Will be out next week, up 3 or 4 weeks, then data crunching. Idea is to add a link to the survey to our site for that period, using unobtrusive banner.

Item 4: DITA-OT Day

Call for proposals / conference details: https://www.oxygenxml.com/events/2018/dita-ot_day.html

Current deadline for proposals is Sunday, based on DITA Europe. If DITA Europe extends deadline then we will likely do the same.

Expect this to be the main topic at our next meeting August 9.

Item 5: Other topics

None today

Item 6: Backlog discussion

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

CSS configuration discussion going on in slack and at https://github.com/dita-ot/dita-ot/issues/3016 -- the design is poor and uses lots of parameters, has been a source of frustration for a long time. Should we just create something new that simplifies it all? General agreement - Roger adds, if we could make handling consistent for other similar files it could be really helpful (HDR type files as well).

[Edit: added later, another issue with CSS options https://github.com/dita-ot/dita-ot/issues/2965 ]

There are two types of resources you may want to associate. JS / CSS are one (linked to from HTML), then HDR / FTR types (inserted directly).

Would like to have simple conventions that focus on the main case - but if we make this really simple with just one parameter, we will have to also draw a line through things that are not supported and require extra coding / extra work.