DocBook Technical Committee Meeting Minutes: 18 June 2008

["Bob Stayton" <bobs@sagehill.net>]

DocBook Technical Committee Meeting Minutes: 18 June 2008
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The DocBook Technical Committee met on Wednesday, 18 June 2008 at
05:00p EDT (02:00p PDT, 21:00GMT, 22:00BST, 23:00CEST, 06:00JST+,
02:30a India+) for 60 minutes.

Agenda

1. Roll call

Present: Jim Early, Paul Grosso, Dick Hamilton, Scott Hudson, Jirka Kosek, 
Ron Morton, Bob Stayton, Norman Walsh.

Absent: Gary Cornelius, Keith Falhgren, 
Patricia Gee, John Hanratty, Gershon Joseph, Dave Pawson,
John Pederson

A quorum of voting members is present.

2. Accepted the minutes[1] of the previous meeting.

3. Next meeting: 16 July 2008

   Regrets from Dick Hamilton.

4. Review of the agenda.

No  new items.

5. Review of open action items

  a. Bob to organize TDG reading after names are fixed.
     CONTINUE.

6.  DocBook 5.0 standards update

Norm says the review period for the Committee Specification
for 5.0 is over, but he has not reviewed all the comments so far.

ACTION: Norm to review comments received so far.

One comment suggested adding Ruby for internationalization.
Jirka mentioned the W3C ITS standard [2] that includes
Ruby as well as other internationization tags.

ACTION: Norm to respond to the poster regarding ITS.


7.  Olink localinfo attribute (Dick Hamilton)

The more recent olink mechanism using targetdoc and
targetptr attributes made other olink attributes
essentially obsolete.  The older attributes were
dropped in 5.0.  However, the localinfo attribute on olink
was one of the old attributes, but it was not dropped.
We will ask the mailing list of anyone is using it, and
if not, schedule it for removal at some future major release
(since removing it is not backwards compatible).

ACTION: Dick to ask the mailing list if localinfo is in use
and how.

8.  Publishing Subcommittee report.

Scott reported that they have produced sample of Shakespeare
from Jon Bosak' XML collection (with permission) using the 
Publishing customization.  They have a spec written, but
were having problems using the OASIS template to publish it.
The plan is that after this review it will be a
working draft from the DocBook TC.

ACTION: Norm to assist in getting the publishing spec published.

9.  Planning for DocBook 5.1.

After 5.0 is a Committee Spec, it could be moved to make it
an OASIS Standard.   However, that is a lot of trouble, and
if there are some immediate changes for 5.1, we may want
to pursue 5.1 as the OASIS Standard instead of 5.0.
We will decide this later, as 5.1 develops.

ACTION: Bob to add to next agenda whether to pursue 5.0 as
an OASIS Standard or wait for 5.1.

10.  Review of Requests for Enhancement

    To browse a specific RFE, enter the URL (on one line):

      http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&;;
      group_id=21935&atid=384107&aid=XXXX

    These RFEs postponed until after 5.0 release
      1097183  Allow Task as a sibling of sections
      1679665  Add better support for modular documentation  

Norm proposed that these extensions could be implemented
at first as customizations, to gauge acceptance and work
out usage issues, before considering them as part of the
spec.  They may also introduce backwards incompatible changes
that would have to wait for a major release.

ACTION: Dick and Jim to investigate using a map for
modular DocBook.

      1722935  DocBook 5: Adding proofreader in @class for othercredit? 

This may already have been done in the Publishing customization.

      1770787  Rename firstname and surname  

This would be backwards incompatible with 5.0, and would have
to come at a major release.

      1778566  allow <xref> and <linkend> in <type>  

This was already closed.

    RFEs to be considered (as of 17 March):
      1812264  insert and delete. block and inline level 

This was already closed.

      1907003  biblioid content model too broad  

Reducing its content model would be backwards incompatible and
could be done only at a major release.

      1912756  Add @scope to index  

Norm to review his understanding of this issue.

      1958051  address should allow orgname 

This is a backwards compatible change to 5.0.  It was moved
seconded, and ACCEPTED.

There was additional discussion about the process for introducing
backwards incompatible changes.  The current committee policy is
to announce backwards incompatible changes in the next major
release, and enact them in the major release following that.
So under these rules, backwards incompatible changes could
be announced in 6.0, and appear in 7.0.  Bob thought this might
be too long of a cycle, and that perhaps the policy could be
reexamined.  

ACTION: Bob to add an agenda item to discuss the policy
for backwards compatible changes.

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[1] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-tc/200804/msg00018.html
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/its/

Bob Stayton
Sagehill Enterprises
bobs@sagehill.net