Meeting minutes 2020 04 02

Attendance: George Bina, Jarno Elovirta, John Pashley, Kris Eberlein, Radu Coravu, Roger Sheen, Shane Taylor, Robert Anderson

Item 1: Any updates about prior releases?

3.4.1 released; we do not expect any further 3.4 patches.

Item 2: DITA-OT 3.5 Development status and updates

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

Largely done. One pull request outstanding from this morning, to fix a regression in the new class attribute matches. Roger had an issue to copy edit some error messages, issue 3492, that should be able to go in. Roger notes with this - the fact that new CLI prints out help commands with the help param is great and wasn't really highlighted before this. (Jarno notes in future, we could add support for tab completion as well, at least in Bash.)

Roger had a conversation today with Eero, about his gradle plugin. Roger usually tries it out with new releases just to check. Running now it gave a message about deprecated stuff, so upgrading gradle might be more work than usual. Suggest sticking with current gradle versions, and upgrade soon after release so we have time to debug. Sounds good.

Jarno also tested latest Saxon version - does not pass all of the integration tests. Looks like a new error thrown by it, even though output likely matches. So, the new version likely works but message count may not match. Should do same with that, upgrade soon after 3.5 so have time to handle.

Same with Java - consider upgrading after 3.5, but ship 3.5 with Java 8. Existing issue says we should move to 11, but 13 is actually latest stable now. We don't have code or dependencies that require more than 8, just puts us behind. Docker build for toolkit uses Java 11.

Still aiming for mid-April release date, looks on target.

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

Release notes for 3.5 in progress.

Submitted pull request to update homebrew formula. Looks tricky, unfortunately that action fires immediately when new code is merged; our travis build takes long enough that our artifacts may not yet be present when the action is fired. Putting on hold for now, if we could build in a delay it might work (run after 15 min instead of immediately).

Doing Vale testing to ensure linguistic consistency - working locally, will put some work into that to wire up some tests to our docs. Won't try to do it for this release because the release is more urgent.

Kris brought up last time - hard to find some plug-in related information in navigation / TOC. We've tweaked that several times. Still on list of things to do.

How to handle subcommands in the past: wary of confusion caused by anyone using dev docs, but not on latest release -- if we just adopt the new syntax any of those people will break. Looking for a way to highlight the new way but also make clear that old syntax is needed for old releases. The "install" command is most commonly used in docs, so working on a way to handle it in particular.

May also need some help with migration topic for 3.5.

For plugin website / registry - we currently have docs saying "for 3.2 and newer use this command, for 3.1 and older use that command". Do we want to add "For 3.5 and later", or leave it alone because the 3.2 syntax still works? Jarno suggests maybe show the latest, with a dropdown for info on how to install with older releases. Probably looks much better than having a prominent list of 3 ways to install.

Jarno: When we release 3.5, we don't have a lot of exciting new features (2.0 might be interesting, subcommands maybe less so?) ... Kris can write something up, blog or similar, to highlight some of the 2.0 related stuff.

Follow-on discussion of how you get these 2.0 doctypes to work in your local environments ... in particular for ditaval, which usually doesn't have a DTD reference, but editors today will validate and complain that you have @outputclass from DITA 2.0.

Item 4: DITA-OT Day

George wonders about having an online conference this year? May be better to have either a series of webinars, or even a series of blog posts to talk about features / releases. Lots of discussion; Robert / Roger / Jarno not anxious to be the focus of an online event.

Item 5: Other topics

Saw issues this morning with Travis, not sure what is going on - our GitHub pull requests usually require a passing Travis test, but that connection is lost. Travis still running, but doesn't show up as required approval. We still require it though.

Item 6: Backlog discussion

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