Meeting minutes 2021 09 02

Attendance: Robert Anderson, Jarno Elovirta, Radu Coravu, Julien Lacour, Roger Sheen, Lief Erickson, John Pashley, Frank Wegmann, Aaron DaMommio, Mitch Abramson

Item 1: Any updates about prior releases?

Any patches planned or other concerns about 3.6?

Item 2: DITA-OT 3.7 Development status and updates

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

• Jarno has gone through a few old pull requests and merged several -- see all recently merged PRs here: https://github.com/dita-ot/dita-ot/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Aclosed+sort%3Aupdated-desc
• Note that the set of PRs linked above may set a record for number of fixes contributed from outside the most frequent contributors
• Discussion around PR for ancestor links: https://github.com/dita-ot/dita-ot/pull/3792 -- fix will allow generation of breadcrumbs but may need to adjust link settings. Also discussed whether this should add "descendant" links -- thinking no, until someone can come up with a use case. It could be done but without something driving it, it's just more code to maintain.
• Extracted AXF code to its own plugin repo.
• Gradle build is having trouble right now, building docs expects the older Saxon; Eero has updated recently and think this should fix, Roger will take a look. If it cannot work for some reason, could consider using project files, but would like to keep the Gradle approach.

Item 3: Doc updates and plans

Main issue right now is the Gradle build issue.

May have to refactor docs code a bit, the Prettier XML plugin we use has been merged into the overall project. But overall project doesn't like config options. So some of our options have gone away, need to update to accommodate (for example, we say no space before / in empty elements). Will also update the Oxygen project files to match the new format.

re: Prettier, extended side conversation about using something like Prettier for our XSLT code base. Everyone who speaks up on the call expresses frustration with the current code, which has wildly inconsistent spacing (for historical reasons, different tools used to write it, code like PDF2 that was contributed with much bigger indents, etc). A change to make it all consistent would mean anyone who tests their overrides using a diff to the code base would have trouble, at least for that release. Something to consider for a 4.0 release but not on a point release.

Item 4: Other topics

Follow-up from last meeting:

• https://github.com/dita-ot/dita-ot/pull/3770 -- still not fully resolved, some discussion in ticket. Think we should just go for it. Large part of the hesitation comes from the concern about use of gen-user-* stubs, those have been around since DITA-OT 1.0 and have never been documented; we have documented alternate ways to do all of the things suggested in comments, so suggest marking those deprecated in 3.7. Will handle as separate PR.
• https://github.com/dita-ot/website/pull/545#discussion_r697900990 -- see ticket for discussion, having trouble including SVG externally; if we can't get that working, consensus on just pulling it inline

Item 5: Backlog discussion

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

Time to go through pull requests, issues tracker, determine how to handle open issues.