Meeting minutes 2016 10 06

DITA-OT Docs Call — October 6, 2016

Contents

• Attendance
• OT project status updates
• New issues since last call
• Fixed issues since last call
• Project planning board review
• Discussion

Attendance

• Kris
• Leigh
• Roger
• Shane

Today it was our pleasure to welcome Leigh White, DITA Specialist at IXIASOFT and author of DITA for Print: A DITA Open Toolkit Workbook as a first-time attendee.

We're very happy that Leigh is interested in contributing to the DITA-OT documentation and look forward to her ideas, insight, and fresh look at the docs.

OT project status updates

The DITA-OT contributor call was held immediately prior to the docs call. Meeting minutes are available at https://github.com/dita-ot/dita-ot/wiki/Meeting-minutes-2016-10-06.

• The 2.3.3 maintenance version was finalized on Sunday, September 25.
  See http://www.dita-ot.org/2.3/release-notes for details. For docs changes, see https://github.com/dita-ot/docs/compare/2.3.2...2.3.3.

New issues since last call

4 new issues were created since the last call.

• #104 – Explain HTML5 parameter extension points
• #105 – Remove dita.preprocess.reloadstylesheet.topicpull from "Common parameters"
• #106 – Revise dita command description w/ new argument syntax
• #107 – Add DCO requirement to contribution info

Fixed issues since last call

A total of 3 issues were closed.

• #89 – Explain outputFile.base
• #101 – Undocumented AHF Properties
• #105 – Remove dita.preprocess.reloadstylesheet.topicpull from "Common parameters"

Roger and Jarno resolved all three on Monday, August 29 during their Helsinki Hackathon.

Project planning board review

The docs issue tracker at https://github.com/dita-ot/docs/issues currently lists 23 open issues, 55 closed (no open pull requests).

Rather than assigning priority labels to issues, we have begun using GitHub's new Projects boards, which provide Kanban-like project planning boards to categorize issues by status, priority, etc.

Currently, we have one board set up for the 2.4 Release. This board provides a status overview for the issues currently scheduled for release with the 2.4 milestone.

Migration info

In addition to the open issues on the board, one of the focus areas for the next few weeks will be further revisions to the migration topics.

Leigh has been aggregating information related to the plug-in migration process in preparation for the new edition of her book, which is already at the publishers and tentatively scheduled for release at DITA-OT Day. While migration is not the primary focus of the book, some of this information may prove useful for the documentation.

• Roger will create a new docs issue to update the info on Leigh's book (#108)

FAQ

We reminded ourselves of the consensus on Radu's FAQ idea #94 from our June call, in which we agreed ”…it would be good to include in docs, perhaps under Getting Started”.

Shane mentioned he has recently implemented FAQs for another project as a simple collection of topic stubs with just titles and short descriptions. This approach seems like a good fit for this scenario, especially if extended with related links that point from each question-and-answer topic to additional resources in the docs.

Extension point listings

Roger is still working on revising the extension point topic generation mechanism to create separate topics for each plug-in, rather than a single topic with all extension points. The topics that group extensions by plug-in would augment the current manually written topics that group extensions by their purpose.

Shane has some local work-in-progress on extension points that he hopes to revisit and share soon as a basis for further discussion/revisions.

Top-level “book” structure

Though we still plan to revise the top-level structure of the docs to remove the outdated User Guide and Developer Reference groupings, we'll postpone this task until after the 2.4 release.

Discussion

For Leigh and others who are just joining us and not yet familiar with Git, we have several resources on our project conventions, setting up your working environment, and getting up to speed w/ Git:

• The docs project ReadMe
• Our coding guidelines
• Git workflow

We're always looking to improve our onboarding information for new contributors, so any feedback on these resources is welcome.

Group call alternatives

Brief discussion on alternatives to WebEx for future docs calls: Shane mentions Google Hangouts, with which Kris has had poor experience in the past. GoToMeeting might be an option (already used by oXygen for OT contributor calls).

Slack offers group calls, but only for paid plans, which are also required to preserve history beyond the 10,000 message limit for free plans (which we already exceed).

Would need to compare pricing for paid plan w/ cost of commercial group calling options.

• Kris offers to inquire whether Slack offers plans for open-source projects.

(Their website mentions a Slack for Nonprofits program, but this seems to require charitable status with the IRS.)

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Created 2016-10-06 15:03

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