Meeting minutes 2016 04 07

DITA-OT Docs Call — April 07, 2016

Contents

• Attendance
• OT project status updates
• New issues since last call
• Fixed issues since last call
• Backlog review
• Issue prioritization
• Other topics

Attendance

• Adam
• Juliane
• Kris
• Nick
• Roger
• Sebastien
• Shane

OT project status updates

The last DITA-OT contributor call was held on March 31.

The April call was shifted forward by a week to provide updates before the DITA North America conference April 4–6.

Meeting minutes are available at https://github.com/dita-ot/dita-ot/wiki/Meeting-minutes-2016-03-31.

• 2.2.4 hotfix planned soon (mid April)
• 2.3 currently scheduled for May

CI builds

Jarno has implemented a continuous integration build of the distribution package from the develop branch, so a new toolkit package is built for each commit.

A link to the latest development version is now provided on the download page of the project website at http://www.dita-ot.org/download.

CI for docs & other recent changes

The CI toolkit package is now used to run the site build whenever changes are pushed to the develop branch of the documentation repository, so the Development docs on the project website can be easily updated for each change.

Currently, the results land on the develop branch of the site repository and are periodically merged to master to update the live site when significant updates are available.

We plan to switch this to send updates directly to the live site soon. See dita-ot/dita-ot.github.io#9.

The CI build is now also run for pull request branches, so we have an indicator of whether the changes in the pull request will build cleanly if merged. See #90. Passing builds are indicated with a green check mark and include a link to the Travis build.

We've made a few small changes to the Sass stylesheets for the docs on the project website to highlight short descriptions and better differentiate parameter listings.

We plan to add “Edit this Page” footers to the docs on the project website sometime soon. This would allow readers to easily contribute fixes via the oXygen web app. See dita-ot/dita-ot.github.io#8.

New issues since last call

7 new issues & pull requests were created since the last call.

Fixed issues since last call

A total of 8 issues & pull requests were closed.

Of those, 2 were pull requests, including Kristen’s refactoring of the plug-in & extension point topics (#85/#21).

Backlog review

Currently 29 Open Issues, 40 Closed, no open PRs: https://github.com/dita-ot/docs/issues.

Issue prioritization

Focus areas for the next few weeks include:

• Further revisions to plug-ins, extension points, & migration topics
• Kris & Roger have work-in-progress on PDF customization, hope to refine & commit soon
• Shane is working on revisions to the topic on Creating a new plug-in extension point
• Nick may have something to share soon w/r/t 2.2 migration

Other topics

(questions, suggestions, discussion)

Based on the changes to the plug-ins & extension points topics, we'd like to revise the topic hierarchy in these sections, but need to think more about how to best structure the information without burying important content like the PDF customization topics too deeply.

Any ideas & suggestions are welcome. We plan to discuss this in the next call.

Kris reported on the DITA-NA conference:

• Less attendees this time, ~260 people
• Good panel session @ end on DITA 1.3
• Robert's presentation on What's New in Toolkit Two was well attended, well received — and funny. “Jetpack” is the new buzzword!
• When Robert asked what OT versions people are on, many answered 1.4, 1.5, etc.
• Several requests for a central OT plug-in list on http://www.dita-ot.org. If not an “official” plug-in registry or package manager, at least a basic list of available plug-ins
  (list by name, maintainer, date of last update, usage notes, issues, etc.)
  Consider linking to plug-ins list from menu of http://www.dita-ot.org.
  To be discussed further in next OT contributor call…

Discussion ensues around the idea of revision flagging to highlight unreleased changes in the Development docs on the project website.

• Should we dogfood the new DITA 1.3 release management domain for this?
• Could we use oXygen's revision tracking to generate @rev attributes?
• We could add @rev info automatically to indicate which version a change appeared in, but this could get messy fast, best to focus only on recent changes
• Kris says many enter @rev info manually, common practise @ IBM & for DITA spec, so it's doable
• Should we use oXygen's change tracking?
• Would we want to publish existing draft comments publicly? No!
• Search for existing draft-comments, try to address & delete them to reduce clutter
• Maybe allow people to add draft comments via the oXygen web app?

Roger will discuss options with George Bina upon his return.