Meeting minutes 2020 01 09

Attendance: Robert Anderson, George Bina, Jarno Elovirta, Roger Sheen, Frank Wegmann, John Pashley, Rob Richter, Guillaume Delory, Lief Erickson, Shane Taylor

Item 1: Any updates about prior releases?

Any patches planned or other concerns about 3.4?

3.4.1 on hold waiting on Robert to figure out what's up with branch filter fix.

Item 2: DITA-OT 3.5 Development status and updates

3.5 project board: https://github.com/orgs/dita-ot/projects/18

Few things open:

• Remove deprecated Ant code (the old list files), replaced ages ago by .job.xml file. This has been deprecated for a long time; if you need the files for some reason, you could generate them on your own from the info in .job.xml. Probably need to document how to use the new version. Details: https://github.com/dita-ot/dita-ot/pull/3434
• Jarno opened pull request to refactor the Command Line to be based on subcommands rather than using a lot of hyphen-hyphen code. Cleaner to use, but it's a change to the API, more or less, and people sometimes like to keep their old more complicated way because they're used to it. Implementation is backwards compatible, old syntax still works. One advantage, if we add something like this, makes it easier to add things like dita migrate if we add a general function to migrate from 1.3 to 2.0. Definitely want to keep the old syntax for a while. Also want to make sure the doc uses the same syntax everywhere (all new or all old). Details: https://github.com/dita-ot/dita-ot/pull/3437
• New pull request in draft syntax -- abstract API for IO. It creates a document builder for passing XML, or get the reader for Sax parsing. Instead of doing it manually every time, we can ask an API called "store" to do that -- read this file and give it to me. Danger: are we making things more complex without getting anything from it? In many cases this lets us replace about 20 lines of code with just one, so seems beneficial. Details: https://github.com/dita-ot/dita-ot/pull/3439
• Robert opened first "DITA 2.0" issue, to deal with how domains are defined. No pull request but some ideas about how to implement, should be a pretty small update. Discussion: could probably be done as a quick Sax filter. Details: https://github.com/dita-ot/dita-ot/issues/3440
• New theoretical idea about how plugins can contribute to the docs. For now, thinking about pushing information about build arguments. Might also be nice to push more information. But key thing to remember, we want to make sure that any contributed doc from plugins don't modify the uplevels setting, resulting in ../ paths from the root doc directory. Discussion about potential implementation ideas, and also, would we want to make same changes for core plugins? Moving our core docs from the docs/ repo into the main repository? Would that become overly complex, and would anybody else make use of it?

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

Suggestion: our pull request template for new features should include a section for "what documentation changes are needed for this feature". Similar: "Will this change affect backwards compatibility / overrides of DITA-OT".

Minor changes to website - slightly revised navigation with fewer menu items, better for smaller screens. Consolidating some items under sub-menus. Now have footer with links to other pages; some pages were not very discoverable, this makes that work better. Also updating underlying framework to most recent bootstrap, 4.4.1 -- in progress and looks like it should be pretty painless.

Item 4: DITA-OT Day 2019

Recordings are now up from Brussels event last fall. Includes recordings from Jason Fox done the day after.

Item 5: Other topics

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Item 6: Backlog discussion

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