Meeting minutes 2020 09 03

Attendance: Robert Anderson, Radu Coravu, Jarno Elovirta, Roger Sheen, Eric Sirois, John Kirkilis, John Pashley, Lief Erickson, Frank Wegmann, Greg Wait

Item 1: Any updates about prior releases?

Any patches planned or other concerns about 3.5?

Currently at 3.5.3. 3.5.4 has a few items ready, may be able to release next week: https://github.com/orgs/dita-ot/projects/26

Radu opened an issue yesterday related to Xerces grammar cache and memory issues - curious discussion of how cache works. Additional discussion of Java memory usage in gem-list. For both issues, asking Radu to open a pull request.

Item 2: DITA-OT 3.6 Development status and updates

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

• Have had discussions about error checking in strict mode. Resulted in several updates to XSLT module to pass error level to our logger, so that "error" in XSLT can be caught in strict mode.
• Updates to troff plugin (which doesn't actually ship by default)
• Finally removed "msgprefix" variable (deprecated in about 2.1 but still had to be defined in order to use output-message templates)
• Tried again to work with Saxon 10 but reporting errors so haven't made the switch yet (test cases fail).
• If we are planning 3.6, we shouldn't break too much; if we are planning 4.0, we could more aggressively deprecate / remove items. Given the timeline, probably better to have 3.6 this year, and plan on 4.0 next year. Hopefully next year we might be able to have an event again and help publicize. Consensus: plan on 3.6, release late November.

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

• Lief's PRs
  • Add links to DITA OT Day videos into relevant topics. Added an icon to indicate links go to video. A bit left to tweak but about ready. https://github.com/dita-ot/docs/pull/304
  • Add links to previous release notes; currently you need to click through to get to each. Also discussed taking it further with consolidated / chunked notes -- link to "everything changed in 3.x", "everything changed in 2.x", etc -- would make it easier to search for when something changed, rather than checking every individual release notes doc. https://github.com/dita-ot/docs/pull/305
• Other issues
  • HTML to DITA conversion is not documented -- looks like this can be closed, it was resolved with an update to LWDita plugin https://github.com/dita-ot/docs/issues/262
  • Suggest adding a link to coding conventions for docs (not just xslt / java) -- Roger will take a look
• Site plug-in https://github.com/dita-ot/org.dita-ot.html/pull/10
• Site PRs
  • Render page description metadata - currently metadata is stripped out, which likely hurts our SEO https://github.com/dita-ot/website/pull/423
  • Add link to DITA-OT Day video https://github.com/dita-ot/website/pull/424

Item 4: DITA-OT Day

On pandemic hold

Item 5: Other topics

Slack message about PDF / FOP? Like to request (link should be good until it gets bumped out by our Slack message limit): https://dita-ot.slack.com/archives/C02DW51E3/p1598827888001400

Issue came up when hitting FOP limits around repeating table headers/titles across pages. Noted some oddities in DITA-OT coding (such as attribute set reflection, goes back to XSLT 1.0 and Idiom's original designs).

Radu provides a link to some extension work: https://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/2.3/extensions.html

The stuff that isn't working in FOP probably is not working because it's hard; trying to fix it would mean learning FOP + writing something up to speed with that project (or hiring someone known to that project to fix it).

Additional discussion around ideas of contributing to project, encouraging others to do so; worth checking out the closing panel discussions from DITA-OT Day conferences, where this topic regularly comes up: https://www.oxygenxml.com/events/2019/dita-ot_day.html

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.