Documentation Tooling Workgroup Meeting - 20 April 2026

Attending

  • Frankin Schrans
  • Vera Mitchell
  • Joe Heck
  • Sven Schmidt
  • Dave Verwer
  • David Ronnqvist
  • Rauhul Varma

Topics

  • How to mitigate risk for late changes

Discussion

  • Franklin: Currently in convergence phase for 6.4, Marcus had a proposed change. Not aware of an open source driver to land this in 6.4, but wanted to discuss with the group on how to progress.
  • One of the details was that "after branch", focused on bug fixing - but workgroups may land additional new elements under feature flags.
  • Marcus: Feature is a new block directive that lets you group and highlight related content. My idea was to use a feature flag - it’s mostly additive features.
  • Joe: How does feature flag work for DocC Render, which is precompiled into the toolchain?
  • Marcus: Feature flag on DocC that enables/disables the content through to the DocC Render.
  • David: The device framework we dropped behind a feature flag, so that when feature flag enabled, it passes but warns it's ignored.
  • Franklin: Sounds like we've quantified some of the risks. Are there any impacts that tweak into code maintenance or impactful for other functionality?
  • Marcus: In terms of function, I think it's pretty much complete - but there may be feedback based on active usage or trials.
  • David: When enabling a feature flag - using "experimental" in the name of the flag clearly implies that changes may come in this.
  • Franklin: What's our bar for landing features under a feature flag?
  • Joe: For the baseline, functionality existing for a general merge to main
  • David: Right now, Mishal's asked us to treat main as a release branch for the next couple of weeks.
  • Joe: For the release branches, additional validation is what I'm looking for - but I'm unaware of how testing/validation scenarios are happening for DocC Render.
  • Marcus: We rely primarily on unit tests right now for testing in DocC Render.
  • David: Landing bug fixes gets harder and harder as we close in to the release window.
  • Franklin: More scrutiny on fixes as we get closer and closer. New features are not as easy to justify. Right now, I'd be willing to bring this in under a feature flag if the risks are low. Sounds like the good next step is doing a code review to identify what, if anything, needs to be followed up for this work.
  • David: Whose responsibility is it to make sure that various features work together?

Action Items