Meeting minutes 2019 12 05

Attendance: Jarno Elovirta, Roger Sheen, Radu Coravu, Robert Anderson, Franz-Josef Knelangen, Frank Wegmann, John Pashley, Lief Erickson, Shane Taylor

Item 1: Any updates about prior releases?

3.4.1 patch project board: https://github.com/orgs/dita-ot/projects/20

Board updated during call; ready for release once doc work and release notes are updated.

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

Time to set up a project board for 3.next, currently using "next"; https://github.com/orgs/dita-ot/projects/18

Have not yet decided for certain that it will be 3.5 vs 4.0.

Should we repeat the 2019 pattern of an earlier release for the first release - around end of Feb / start of March - allowing a longer release with more content for the fall release? Robert thinks probably a good idea. Jarno suggests it would allow a previews of a feature, with more time to solidify on final version.

Settled on that as tentative plan, release 3.5 around end of Feb.

Plans for items to include?

• Additional resources pull request: https://github.com/dita-ot/dita-ot/pull/3412 Still has some issues to work out around building a single PDF, but ready for testing.
• As we get closer, should decide about shipping draft of DITA 2.0 grammar files
• Should we open issues for 2.0 features? Probably a good idea for at least some of them (the more stable ones). For example, the new <include> element.
• How to handle 2.0 features that don't match 1.3? Add an option in the code (process as 2.0, or as 1.3)? If we're supporting 1.3 forever, do we have forever-code that has to support both versions? Could consider a pre-process step that tries to update files to equivalent, where possible, but that can't catch everything.
• To help catch items that are deprecated in 1.x and removed in 2.0, there is a plugin available: https://www.dita-ot.org/plugins#!org.metadita.deprecated
• Lionel was asking for a way to move images into a common images directory. Jarno started working on that, in draft stage: https://github.com/dita-ot/dita-ot/pull/3413 We already rewrite file names from the internal hash back to a real file name at end of preprocess2; we could have a way to catch that and write out your own alternate name. But while renaming files, also have to rewrite any links to those files. Easiest in Java, but most of our user community does not want to write Java. Could send the job file into an XSLT step that lets you rewrite, and then process the updated job, but not really optimal -- serialize your job into XML just to allow XSLT, then pull back in, kind of an ugly way to process. Could maybe use JavaScript to modify the job? Not getting other suggestions in call.

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

Will work on release notes for 3.4.1 soon, and try to add info to docs about plugins outside of expected directory.

Will take down the DITA-OT Day banner soon, keeping up for a bit to direct people to the videos.

Open pull request based on DITA-OT Day feedback from Lief, others, about making it easier to see what version of docs you're viewing. https://github.com/dita-ot/website/pull/299 One comment already, having the version selector near the search field may give incorrect impression that you can search a specific version of docs (we only index latest). Preview here: https://deploy-preview-299--dita-ot.netlify.com/dev/

Item 4: DITA-OT Day 2019

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

Item 5: Other topics

Next meeting planned for Jan 9.

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.