Meeting minutes 2019 06 06

Attendance: Radu Coravu, John Pashley, Robert Anderson, Lief Erickson, Frank Wegmann, Kris Eberlein, Shane Taylor, Roger Sheen, Jarno Elovirta, Zoe Lawson

Item 1: Any updates about prior releases?

Hotfix 3.3.2 is out.

Branch created for hotfix 3.3.3; project: https://github.com/orgs/dita-ot/projects/16

Robert has added a few items already for 3.3.3, and working hard on a DITAVAL flagging issue that has come up sometime in the last couple releases.

Also need to get a look at Shane's pull request that was accidentally closed when 3.3.2 branch was removed.

Item 2: DITA-OT 3.4 Development status and updates

3.4 project board: https://github.com/orgs/dita-ot/projects/12

Jarno finding some interesting quirks with our conref push implementation (pulling in a dom tree, serializing into a Sax stream), where the result is not working; may be that Saxon has become more strict about some rules and some invalid syntax no longer works. But overall realized that our conref push implementation needs work. Work going here: https://github.com/dita-ot/dita-ot/pull/3315

This sort of leads into idea for next iteration -- would really like to simplify things. Our project has been around long enough to accumulate a lot of technical debt -- it would really be nice to simplify, make things run better / easier to understand / easier to maintain. Problem is: doesn't give end users much to be excited about. Several examples of this, such as the attribute-set-reflection code in PDF2, or the topicmerge process; Robert's work (aimed for 3.3.3) on ditaval flagging code also led to a lot of dusty old code that can be significantly simplified.

Roger speculates: what is the latest state of open-source support for CSS based PDF output? Is it far enough along that we can put some of our limited resources on it? Would be really nice to have something, even if it's not great, because work is progressing. General issue: a Java based renderer is ideal. For example if the renderer is in Python we'd have to ship a whole new runtime.

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

Roger hoping for feedback on this issue, specifically testing the code on Windows to see if it works better than what we have today (it does on Mac): https://github.com/dita-ot/docs/pull/251

Documentation (samples) project files open but still marked as draft: https://github.com/dita-ot/docs/pull/252 Given the status, Roger's thought is to merge it as-is.

Lief has been doing a lot of work on indexing for his master's thesis, and has created a pull request on it (this has also uncovered some interesting quirks in our index processing, leading to some issues against the main project): https://github.com/dita-ot/docs/pull/258 Does not mean we will actually publish an index automatically, can still continue to refine as needed.

DITA-OT Day banner ready to add on site: https://github.com/dita-ot/website/pull/215.

And final comment, Roger working on syntax highlighting with Prism, something that has been a goal for a while but now prompted by Lief noticing that we had setup in place for it: https://github.com/dita-ot/website/pull/216.

Item 4: DITA-OT Day 2019

https://www.oxygenxml.com/events/2019/dita-ot_day.html

Radu would like someone from the main project to send email to dita-users list. Robert will send that.

Also would like to have a clearer "hook" for what we are wanting to see. The focus likely should be on the plugin registry; still have a lot of people not aware of it, and having some of the things like Jason Fox's cat plugin can help draw people in + make it memorable while also helping them find the more useful ones.

Roger points out: last year we introduced the stale bot and said we were going to use it; we should give an update.

Radu suggests: dita-ot through the ages? how it evolved, etc.

Item 5: Other topics

John Pashley asks: do we know, what awareness there is among those using dita-ot, that they are? for example, in editors people are using dita-ot but may not know what plugins / customizations are available. Roger: no, that is one of the things that led to our dita-ot.org landing page design, to highlight that we're under the covers of so much.

Question about cross deliverable linking - is it planned as part of the project file update, or is the project a pre-requisite? Not planned, and not a prereq but might help. Comes down to assumptions -- if you can come up with a set of assumptions for how your content will work, then it becomes easier, but right now really have to make some of those assumptions. Makes it hard to put an implementation in core code because we try not to make assumptions that would break others. Robert has an internal implementation but it makes a lot of those assumption. Suggestion: our docs could explicitly list this as an item we do not support; Kris volunteers to draft some content for that https://github.com/dita-ot/docs/issues/259.

Question about FOP: any way to push on them to integrate Eliot's pull request to support change bars? Not sure - the project does not have a lot of activity and we do not know their thoughts on Eliot's code. His pull request is here: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FOP-1760

Question: anybody familiar with generating output in a markdown format suited for Hugo? Not on this call...

Next meeting will be delayed a week to July 11, to avoid conflicts with US July 4 holiday.

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.