Meeting minutes 2022 01 13

Attendance: Robert Anderson, Jarno Elovirta, Radu Coravu, John Pashley, Frank Wegmann, Lief Erickson, Chris Papademetrious, Roger Sheen, Mitch Abramson

Item 1: Any updates about prior releases?

No additional patches planned for 3.6

Item 2: Finalizing DITA-OT 3.7

Finalizing the release: https://github.com/orgs/dita-ot/projects/27

Just put in latest OASIS grammars this week (Tuesday, OASIS voted to remove a lot of unused markup from 2.0)

Had a few comments to incorporate into release notes, Lief incorporated, just need to merge it.

Once docs are done and good, need to tag that repo, update the commit in main repo. Once that's done, can finalize release. Manual bit to update homebrew, release JAR file. While doing that Roger will prep the doc site. Will be trying out GitHub Action for first time to push out 3.7 directory on docs. Some manual steps now due to things needing to be out before next step starts, so will click buttons in sequence. Also will be first time trying this new GitHub Actions based release, fingers crossed that no issues crop up, if so always have more manual steps to get around them.

Item 3: Doc updates and plans

Lief getting an error that Roger does not - has been happening for a couple years though so likely just need to open an issue.

We use Algolia for doc search (free of charge as open source project). They're making some changes - basically it means we are upgraded to their more powerful product, still free of charge, but we need to make a couple of changes. Have some improved features, some faceted search by release for example; likely going to hold on the upgrade until after release process is done.

Item 4: Release 4.0 planning

Time to break things? Time to break things! What might we do that is backwards incompatible:

• Will remove things that have been marked deprecated (some for years)
• Consider upgrading version of Java
• Consider removing customization directories, possibly adding in the new yaml template plugin as improvement
• Also consider a similar templating language for HTML
• Would like to rework how "skip" properties work: https://github.com/dita-ot/dita-ot/issues/3845
• Might want to switch html5 to use preprocess2 rather than preprocess
• See what we can do to improve logging, make it more human-readable and less ant-ish
• Revisit documentation for preprocess pipeline, maybe document the output of it more clearly

What else to implement:

• DITA 2.0, continue work. For example support chunk="split"
• Need more thought on how to support DITA 2.0 and DITA 1.3 together. At least initially, it will be some sort of "results might vary".

At what point do we switch our own docs to use DITA 2.0 source? Roger asks: should we leave some of it as 1.3 just to have that test case as part of our own stuff? Would like to use 2.0 content for the next release, leaving one branch as 1.3 seems wise.

Question about LwDITA ... we have a set of examples, not everything went thru as we think it should given the current state of the specification. Could be some areas there that are not working as expected, would be nice to improve support.

Item 5: DITA-OT Day / Comtech

Convex in May - Robert signed up to talk about breaking compatibility with 4.0

Item 6: Other topics

...

Item 7: 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.