Meeting minutes 2020 08 13

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

Item 1: Any updates about prior releases?

Any patches planned or other concerns about 3.5?

Project board for 3.5.3: https://github.com/orgs/dita-ot/projects/25

Only a couple of items, one pretty minor (preserving IDs / classes from <steps>) and one that fixes a regression in our own PDF docs (conkeyref not resolving).

Roger also working on a doc update to fix inconsistencies around PATH variables. Planning to bring that in to 3.5.3 before it goes out.

Plan to release 3.5.3 soon (depends on busy schedules of next few days). May be able to make use of new action that automates Homebrew releases.

Item 2: DITA-OT 3.6 or 4.0 Development status and updates

Project board for next release: https://github.com/orgs/dita-ot/projects/21

DITA 2.0 making slow progress; much discussion of syntax diagrams, which will have a minor update in DITA 2.0 to rewrite class attribute values.

Jarno has added an easier way to handle multiple filter files on the CLI; you can use multiple --filter options rather than concatenating them.

Improvements coming to use of Store API which allows you to interact with temporary files in memory. Even if we don't get to fully in memory processing, it will allow for better caching that may give processing a boost. Will not be the default processing; still trying to improve on it, but may be an option for those who can make use of it.

Radu opened an issue about Apache FOP 2.5 -- new release is out. Might be nice to upgrade.

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

ProBot has notified us about some older issues, and created new discussions. Radu asked some questions about this search topic: https://github.com/dita-ot/docs/issues/217

We think most of the issues in there are fixed by updating search routines - may be safe to close now? Radu agrees that it's OK to close now. Main issue is that we don't have a "search results" page, we just have a dropdown of matches, but not clear how to fix that without entirely replacing our search tools. Planning to mark closed.

Radu also suggested adding links to DITA-OT Day sessions. We've partially addressed by adding links to each DITA-OT Day itself on our common footer. But Radu pointed out -- some of our doc pages could be enhanced by linking to videos of talks on a specific related subject. Task seems daunting at this point because we have a lot of talks so not sure which links are useful where. Really like the idea so if others know of a specific talk that would be useful for a page, would like to add it.

Discussions about links in our docs -- is it better/worse to have headers showing when you use a deep link, or should the heading be the top item on a page? Sample of the behavior here: https://deploy-preview-411--dita-ot.netlify.app/dev/

Item 4: DITA-OT Day

On pandemic hold

Item 5: Other topics

Jarno thinking again about supporting multiple input files. Code sort of works but in some situations it's not clear what the "correct" thing to do is. How do you create a PDF if you have two input book maps? So ... should we limit multiple input files to topics? Seems acceptable -- release limited (but clear and working) function rather than waiting to figure out how to handle the edge cases. Support topic inputs; if using keys, you can always pass in a map as a resource, which resolves those keys.

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.