Meeting minutes 2021 05 06

Attendance: Robert Anderson, Radu Coravu, John Pashley, Jarno Elovirta, Joe Williams, Greg Wait, Zoe Lawson, Lief Erickson, Roger Sheen, John Kirkilis

Item 1: Any updates about prior releases?

Any patches planned or other concerns about 3.6? Roger submitted a small patch for German PDFs, only item in the queue. Has likely been present for 10 years so probably does not justify a patch for just that, but could bundle if any other patch is planned.

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

Project board for next release: https://github.com/orgs/dita-ot/projects/27

• Chunking 2.0 now merged to develop. Chunk "combine" ready for folks to kick the tires. Robert has done (very minimal) testing and got good results. Also would welcome new tests. Follow-on discussion about doctypes, any way to say "treat my files with the generic 1.x doctype as DITA 2" -- Robert is worried about this, it would work as a way to test things but we expect some files would fail to parse due to backwards incompatible changes. The generic doctype is defined as being the latest 1.x, so editors will continue to enforce that, so with every edit that keeps it as 1.x, you increase the chance of killing your build with a parser error.
• Error messages / message levels: what should the right level of logging be (by default) on the CLI? Currently info messages are hidden. Per our docs, info messages call attention to things that are working as designed, but that authors should be aware of. https://www.dita-ot.org/dev/topics/error-messages.html The problem is, not only are DOTX123I info messages defined as info, so are all the XSL and Java logging items that come out listing files read, etc. Hard to find a happy medium. Probably no right answer here, there are distinct differences between use cases, some people want verbose, some want verbose and use regex tools to grab the important bits, some want what we have today (only give me the warning/error otherwise I start to ignore everything). Ideal would be if CLI default put out errors, warnings, and declared info messages (where our code calls the "output message" or related function), but file I/O was left for verbose mode as today. Currently, warning and info are very similar in dita-ot; basically both indicate something that might be wrong, where warning = "you probably need to fix this but maybe not", and info is the opposite "this is probably what you want, but maybe not".

Item 3: Doc updates and plans

• Netlify pull request previews failing, related to github action somehow, needs debugging
• Updated homebrew topic with minor changes on installation location, reflect latest mac changes, and homebrew on linux

Item 4: DITA-OT Day

Maybe in 2022...?

Item 5: Other topics

• Update on DITA 2.0 progress: vote next week (probably) on replacement for copy-to
• OASIS webinar coming up on DITA 2.0, meant for vendors to understand what's coming

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.