Assessment of the iteration that has ended

We’ve been lax about keeping minutes so far, this year, due to life, work, and the dark winter time taking a toll on our ability to work on Subplot. We have concentrated on making changes and less on taking meeting minutes.

We have switched away from Pandoc, and no longer use it to parse markdown input, or to produce typeset output. As part of that we have, at least temporarily, dropped support for PDF output, and only support HTML output. We’re close to the end of the current goal now.

Discussion

Async meeting

Due to network problems, we couldn’t do a synchronous video meeting today, so we’re doing this async using a merge request.

The gitlab.com hosting situation

We reviewed the billing page for Subplot on gitlab.com. It all looks OK. We’re over the limit on seats, but it seems we can increase the seats for free.

We will review the billing page every iteration or two.

The current period of GitLab granting us free resources as an open source project is stated as coming to an end soon despite Daniel requesting an extension.

Repository review

We didn’t review any issues, but did review merge requests, and CI pipelines for all the projects in the Subplot group on gitlab.com.

We discussed the open merge requests:

• Subplot merge request 322 (fix(src/codegen.rs): formatting)
  • apparently cargo fmt results in different formatting with different versions of the Rust toolchain, and so CI fails with the MSRV toolchain or the current toolchain
  • we should change the MSRV test to NOT run clippy or formatting checks

Extra branches:

• there is now only one extra branch, for Subplot merge request 322
• Lars deleted his old branches, now that we no longer use Pandoc

Recurring items issues

There are some issues tagged recurring-agenda-item in the issue tracker, which we discuss in every iteration meeting.

• subplot#119 – Subplot is in not in Debian unstable
  • we will work on reducing Subplot dependencies that aren’t already in Debian
  • need the dependency list; we are not targeting bookworm

What’s remaining for current goal?

We need to add support for multiple markdown input files (see subplot#318). Once this is done, we can re-enable reference.md, and then make a release, and when we do, we should see if we can use GitLab CI to build an executable binary of the release.

We decided to not worry about using marked data types. It’s a good idea, but not actually a blocker for the current goal.

Goals

Goal 3: Current goal

Subplot is altered to treat a YAML document as the root of any subplot document, permitting multiple markdown files to be joined into a single scenario set or output document. We remove our dependency on Pandoc’s AST for internal document representation, and support a better range of document metadata as a result. We will use marked data types where possible to permit better provenance information in error and warning messages; and we will strive to reenable the reference tests such that we can make a statement to the effect that post goal 3, we do not intend to make further breaking changes to the input formats or primary behaviours of Subplot.

(Related issues on gitlab)

Goal 4: Planned

This goal is very likely to change. This is merely an initial sketch.

We’ll improve documentation and generally aim at making Subplot more plausibly usable by people outside of the Subplot project.

(Related issues on gitlab)

Plan for new iteration

Issues

We intend to work on the following issues (Subplot milestone 9), mostly carried over from the previous iteration:

• subplot#318 – Lacks support for multiple markdown files

Actions

These are in addition to work on issues chosen for this iteration.

• Daniel to determine what happened and ensure we won’t lose our OSS SaaS subscription.
• Lars to produce a list of dependencies of Subplot, for subplot#119.
• Lars to change the MRSV CI pipeline to NOT run clippy or formatting checks.

Meeting participants

• Daniel Silverstone
• Lars Wirzenius