Meeting minutes 2024 07 11 - dita-ot/dita-ot GitHub Wiki

Attendance: Frank Wegmann, Robert Anderson, Radu Coravu, John Pashley, Jarno Elovirta, Lief Erickson, Roger Sheen, Brianna Stevens-Russell, Konrad Kołodziejczyk, Kris Eberlein

Item 1: Any updates about prior releases?

No patches planned at the moment for 4.2.

Item 2: DITA-OT Next Development status and updates

Project board for next release: https://github.com/orgs/dita-ot/projects/46

Ops board: https://github.com/orgs/dita-ot/projects/39

Jarno has been playing with DITA-OT running from JAR files. Slow progress / really big item. Current task is trying to get XML Catalog resolver working, has not been quite so straightforward as hoped.

CLI command now lets you pass in multiple inputs / formats; interesting feature that could let you build a map to multiple formats without reloading JAR files.

Discussion about whether to push current work out as 4.3? We do not have a lot built up for a release at this point, also limited resources for documentation. Don't have a big story to tell in terms of features that would justify an upgrade. The updated lwdita plugin does have new support discussed in these calls, about embedding DITA content ... but that's out as a plugin and people who want to try it could update independently of major DITA-OT upgrade.

Feeling seems to be -- no urgency for new release, not a lot of features and hard to tell a story that would justify upgrading. Could certainly still do a new patch for 4.2 if we have big fixes.

Discussion of new issue https://github.com/dita-ot/dita-ot/issues/4489 about DITA-OT continuing after fatal error, would be nice to clean that up.

Item 3: Doc updates and plans

Relatively quiet summer, but following up on discussions from last call (subcommand removing support for old methods). If you're using an old version of OT, that version of docs still has the info, but no longer advertising that in latest.

Roger had discussion with Konrad about ways to set up a toolkit alongside source in a repository. He posed the question, why haven't we mentioned this in docs? Question about best practices: if you have a small setup where you are using git as file system, have a toolkit and plugins on your file system, and using it to publish -- how would you lay it out? Answer: the ways people use OT is so vastly different (from file system to CMS), how could we cover best practices? We do have a section on best practices for plugins, but should we as a project tell people how to set this up?

Consensus - this seems to be a very useful idea. Information out there about this now is very scattered, much of it very old, making it hard to know what to rely on. Follow up discussion on a sort of dita init command that, if we have sample recommended project setup, could actually do that setup for you.

Other subject - we have a dita install command to install plugins, docs could use an update to describe how to install a specific version of the plugin. Just giving the plugin name gets you the latest.

Item 4: DITA-OT Day 2025

DITA Europe is working on a plan, looking at first two weeks of February. Nothing official yet.

Item 5: Other 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.