Meeting minutes 2014 02 11

Attendance: George Bina, Radu Coravu, Jarno Elovirta, Robert Anderson, Eliot Kimber, Graham Hay, Eric Sirois, Jim Tivy,

Current release: 1.8.# package

1.8.4 has a few bug fixes in place. Could release soon. With 1.8.3, the PDF build was having issues, seems related to @copy-to.

Eric Sirois had put in a pull request with some XSD updates - thought merged late last year. Had a second update in January, thought was done in hotfix/1.8.3 branch.

General note for "how to contribute", easiest if branch names are tied to the issue - create a branch, do pull request, essentially forget about / discard the branch.

DITA-OT 2.0

Lots of work this week on DITA 1.3 items: Jarno has been working on branch filter, metadata cascade, new grouping in attributes. Deferring key scoping until he has more time. Metadata cascade has initial implementation, but needs extension to work on sub-elements of maps. Haven't added test cases yet. Created separate branch in test suite repo, to allow us to keep updating 1.8 without running the new DITA 1.3 test cases.

New groups for filtering also almost done, matches spec but Jarno has some issues with spec so could change.

Branch filtering needs more thought, need to clarify some items. Old problem that spec doesn't mandate a processing order, but does mandate some dependencies, so difficult to wrap head around - at which point should branch filtering take place, where can it be. Robert / Jarno need to discuss. Note that branch filtering covers several operations, don't need to evaluate them all at the same time (filter, duplicating / renaming files and keys, etc).

Discussion of @copy-to: plan to rewrite those to @href early on. Simplifies all later code. Existing plug-ins that have special code for @copy-to are fine, just won't execute that special code anymore.

Discussion of "dita" vs "dita-ot" vs "ditaot" as command name for the 2.0 build; not a strong preference either way, except that UNIX convention generally pushes against "dita-ot" (no hyphens in command name).

Doc updates needed / edits needed?

Change topic "what's new in 1.2" so that it describes upcoming work on 1.3. Release notes are a bigger deal, will have bigger description of features. Big fear of backwards compatibility - need to address that in release notes, likely have pointer to topic on that. Biggest hit will be to deep customizations of preprocess code, at this point very few items that would hit PDF or XHTML customizations.

Other items

Graham has spent last month looking at ODT transform, figuring out mechanics, in preparation for doing something constructive. Suggestion from Jarno: two pass model, to help restructure into a more format-centric presentation (disallow para in para, etc), then convert to ODT -- or WordXML, or something else similar.