Meeting minutes 2022 11 03

Attendance: Robert Anderson, Eric Sirois, Radu Coravu, John Pashley, Lief Erickson, John Kirkilis, Roger Sheen, Chris Papademetrious, Jarno Elovirta, Guillaume Delory, Frank Wegmann, Mitch Abrammson

Item 1: Any updates about prior releases?

3.7.4 is now available. Accidentally closed without merging / moving a couple of 3.7.4 directed PRs -- should have been pushed develop.

One issue opened about URI scheme with images: https://github.com/dita-ot/dita-ot/issues/4032

Robert also saw an oddity with external image references, where it reads the metadata from external images

Item 2: DITA-OT 4.0 Development status and updates

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

• Jarno has been focused on LwDITA plugin and on PDF themes (which are in separate repo), less work lately in base
• Feels like 4.0 is not that full of features, but probably want to stick with convention of release at conference
• Major new "features" for 4.0 seem like they will really be for those external plugins, which don't really have their own release notes. Need to figure out how to write that up ... release notes for OT likely need to give more detail about those plugins.
• Need to think about what to bill as release highlights -- move to java 17 -- attribute reflection changes -- chunking for DITA 2.0 -- skip properties

Discussion about Java upgrade - plugins can continue to use Java 8, because Java is aggressively backwards compatible. But core code will now use Java 17.

Discussion about Saxon - have not been able to update due to compatibility issues. As Jarno notes, would be nice if everyone could buy a license to support the project, but not everyone has one. Saxon does occasionally change APIs, which means we might have hard dependencies on specific versions.

Discussion of project files - few new extensions (new feature? new enhancement? depends on who is describing it). There is certainly a distinction, although it may not be clear to many readers. One comment from John - they generally classify as "bug fix" or "new capability", don't get hung up on new feature or new enhancement to existing feature. Agreement from Mitch.

Item 3: Doc updates and plans

If not covered above...

Item 4: DITA-OT Day 2022

Rotterdam discussion

Item 5: Other topics

...

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.