Meeting minutes 2022 06 02

Attendance: Jarno Elovirta, Radu Coravu, Robert Anderson, Lief Erickson, John Pashley, Chris Papademetrious, Roger Sheen, Kris Eberlein, Mitch,

Item 1: Any updates about prior releases?

3.7.2 is now available

Item 2: DITA-OT 4.0 Development status and updates

Project board for next release: https://github.com/orgs/dita-ot/projects/29

• Pull request is open for better cache of RelaxNG Schemas - Jarno will take a look
• With Java 17, DITA-OT on Windows is noticeably slower than on Java 8. There is a Java parameter to enable cache, can be added to dita.bat script. Could be used for people on newer Java than 9.
• Radu went through Oxygen patches for DITA-OT and could open several pull requests, primarily fixes.
• Robert would like to integrate support for keytext in text resolution for keys, but has proven difficult.
• Would be nice if the code could highlight 2.0 vs 1.x, so that they are visibly separate -- if I took this out, it would drop one version's support. Also could make it easier to focus on refactoring for new 2.x code.
• We've also taken an approach where we rewrite content that is 1.3 to look like 2.0, so that we can focus on that new support.
• Continue discussion of breaking Customization directories for PDF2. In theory, not realistic, we could come up with every possible customization directory, and come up with a migration path for each. Problem is that we just don't know how many people are doing this, and that there are so many different ways of doing it. Customization folder as param, folder in plugin, folder in plugin combined with normal plugin code, etc. Kris notes ... anyone who got a plugin from a folder 10 years ago from a consultant, is probably also still on 2.5 or other older folder. Could ping dita-users to get some input on this, will not be comprehensive but could collect info. Also note that "I have no idea" is probably an option here, many people won't know if they are using it. Could post about it on discussion area, ask dita-users to respond either on list or in that discussion area. Think that discussion area also supports polls.
• Saxon update still pending, changed how it bundles XML catalog library and is proving to be tricky. Still have to support old Ant catalog construct, which relies on the old XML catalog.
• FOP - should be able to update.
• Do we want to introduce more conventions around code formatting? Github does have a way to say "when comparing changes, ignore this commit" which will help with comparisons to the past. One maybe larger concern, if we still have patches coming in to 3.7, those will become really hard to follow. So should we reformat late? Yes: want to do late in release cycle for this reason. If we have patches after the pretty-print, we'd need to run that same pretty-print on the hotfix branch before merging back to develop. No rush to implement this though. Also need to ensure the Java style is good, and works with the IDEs used by our devs. Also have some nervousness about XSLT, aware that auto-indenting can really mess up the complex XPATH we have, or throw off xsl:text elements by adding spaces that throw off output.
• Talked last time about DITA-OT Project File collections - anything that can help with that effort? Jarno's main concern is that it adds a lot of complexity / overhead to something that was intended to be quite simple. Don't really want to start implementing until we know for sure how it should work. Chris: could call it a "deliverable set" rather than "collection", which makes the deliverable option usable. https://github.com/dita-ot/dita-ot/issues/3914

Item 3: Doc updates and plans

• Minor update to download page to make latest release more visible
• Need to begin documenting changes for configuration based PDF

Item 4: DITA-OT Gathering

November? Looks like DITA Europe is probably happening. Up in the air now how big a crowd we might draw, and would need to determine who to try and target / what focus areas for talks.

Item 5: Other topics

Question about cascading of metadata in submaps - in discussion area here: https://github.com/dita-ot/dita-ot/discussions/3927

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.