Meeting minutes 2023 01 12

Attendance: Robert Anderson, Frank Wegmann, John Kirkilis, Jarno Elovirta, Radu Coravu, Roger Sheen, John Pashley, Julien Lacour, Lief Erickson, Will MacLean, Chris Papademetrious

Item 1: Any updates about prior releases?

Patches planned or other concerns about 4.0?

Project board for 4.0.2: https://github.com/orgs/dita-ot/projects/40

Jarno saw a Stack Overflow question about a 4.0.1 error message [DOTA015F].

Fatal error when you try to set the old skip property. New skip property for the build step - we had hoped to do more work on it, so might have shipped an update that was too strict, so may want to fix that to make it less strict. Per that post, this causes a break for dita->word plugin. Maybe relax this, allow the old property with a warning about deprecated.

Julien has found another bug where the parameter that lets you specify an alternate resource map, can write a temporary copy of the map over the original in the source folder.

John K notes that there is an issue with metadata in submaps getting lost - Robert notes that it's there in preprocessing in a hidden element, cannot remember why it was saved there rather than put in a topicmeta element. Believe that putting it in topicmeta had unintended consequences, with the submap-containter getting treated as a new topic or similar.

Lief points to related discussion here: https://github.com/dita-ot/dita-ot/discussions/3927.

Item 2: DITA-OT 4.1 Development status and updates

Project board for next release: https://github.com/orgs/dita-ot/projects/36

Robert merged syntax updates, so OASIS markup from 1.3 and 2.0 is handled consistently

Jarno continuing to make progress on items like PDF theme

Radu notes - there is a new pull request to add logging for project files, would like a review: https://github.com/dita-ot/dita-ot/pull/4100

Chris P also notes - has a few pull quests open and would like a review:

• https://github.com/dita-ot/dita-ot/pull/3955
• https://github.com/dita-ot/dita-ot/pull/3968
• https://github.com/dita-ot/dita-ot/pull/4089
• https://github.com/dita-ot/dita-ot/pull/4093

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

Item 3: Doc updates and plans

Got pull request from Mark Giffin, hoping for updates & feedback from Jarno & Robert on how to scope extension points: https://github.com/dita-ot/docs/pull/452.

Item 4: Project funding

John Kirkilis had an email exchange with Kris E about this, based on her 2016 DITA-OT day presentation on the subject (Video, Slides).

Kris has been interested in a DITA foundation that could potentially support both. John researched existing foundations that have projects, like Eclipse / Apache, but you have to do things their way. Or, we look into creating our own. We're not a startup project that needs the "startup / getting started" type help. John will continue looking into this, at some point will probably create a proposal, hope evolve it into something that results in help. Funding project, training, whatever else is needed to help adoption, promotion, etc.

Roger notes that the admin overhead of creating a foundation is really what's kept us from doing this, particularly the added complexity if it needs to cover both project and spec. That's what has slowed it in the past, doesn't have to be a barrier. Couple of lighter weight options have appeared more recently.

1. GitHub Sponsors Particularly for enterprise users, this lets you pay a company / get receipt. So that avoids a foundation or hiring of project lawyers.

2. Open Collective Basically a platform for “fiscal hosting”, where they take a cut (5–10%), but let you use it so that you don't have to do all the foundation work on your own.

   Several host options:

   • Open Collective Foundation for charitable activities in the U.S.
   • Open Source Collective for worldwide open source projects This one seems best suited for our purpose & easy to join, as their acceptance criteria apply to us:

     If you are an open source project on GitHub you will likely be immediately approved. We have a built-in process that automates validation using GitHub authentication.

   • Open Collective Europe for European open source & charities (primarily working on social issues)

In addition to funding/sponsorship, these types of orgs could be used to let the collective hold the rights to the dita-ot.org domain, for example.

Don't know how well any of those would work for DITA specification though.

To be continued…

Item 5: 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.