Assessment of the iteration that has ended

The previous iteration was Subplot milestone 12.

There were no actions from the previous meeting.

We have made good progress and have nearly finished goal 3. See below for what’s left.

Discussion

The gitlab.com hosting situation

We reviewed the billing page for Subplot on gitlab.com. It all looks OK.

We will review the billing page every iteration or two.

Repository review

We reviewed issues (see below) and MRs. We made the decision to keep the reference test MR open until the release process during the next iteration.

We also checked in on CI pipelines for all the projects in the Subplot group on gitlab.com.

Extra branches: none.

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
  • Our plan is to wait until we can do cargo update using the Rust toolchain in Debian testing without having to adjust any of the dependencies to newer version, before we approach Debian about packaging Subplot.
  • We hope that an active Debian developer has interest in Subplot, as we neither in position to actively help in maintaining packages in Debian of Subplot and its dependencies. Time will tell if this happens.

What’s remaining for current goal?

We resolved all the main issues we identified last month around goal 3 but there are still two issues left with the goal 3 label.

• subplot#305 Maybe create binary release? remains as the officially last thing we need to do for goal 3
• subplot#330 Re-enable reference.md after next release which needs to be done once the goal 3 release is completed.
• subplot#332 Define and document clearly … breaking change needs to be compeleted so that we do not accidentally break things in the future.

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. It will need to be discussed in depth when we finish the previous goal.

We’ll improve the quality of life of people using Subplot:

• we’ll improve the ease of use and comprehension of the output of documents generated by Subplot
• we’ll improve the documentation of Subplot itself
• we’ll make error messages and other diagnostics more helpful for users to fix whatever the problem is

We aim to have a fairly short and time-boxed goal 4, maybe on the order of two or three months. The goal 3 duration (well over a year) was long enough to be de-motivating to use as developers. Thus, we scope our actual tasks so that they are likely to be achieved by us, given our time and energy constraints. We’d rather have more frequent small goals than more ambitious goals that take a long time to achieve.

(Related issues on gitlab)

Plan for new iteration

Issues

We did a very brief skim of recent issues and decided on what we needed for this final iteration which we wanted to keep pretty lightweight, but with a release at the end to complete goal 3 - we will make that release in person together at our next meeting.

We created Subplot milestone 13 with the following issues:

• subplot#305 Maybe create binary release? remains as the officially last thing we need to do for goal 3
  • Lars and Daniel to discuss and explore this further. If we choose not to do this for goal 3 it will not be a problem
• subplot#330 Re-enable reference.md after next release which needs to be done once the goal 3 release is completed.
• subplot#332 Define and document clearly … breaking change needs to be compeleted so that we do not accidentally break things in the future.
• subplot#333 Make a release In order to complete goal 3 we must make a release, so here we go.

After these are all done, we have finished goal 3.

We also labelled subplot#303 with fixed-in-next-version.

Actions

No additional actions.

Meeting participants

• Daniel Silverstone
• Lars Wirzenius