Minutes from 36th OpenVDB TSC meeting, December 19, 2019, (GMT)

Attendees: *Nick* A., *Dan* B., *Jeff* L., *Ken* M.

Additional Attendees: John Mertic (LF)

Regrets: *Peter* C.

Agenda:

1) Confirm quorum
2) Secretary
3) Road map / AX
4) OpenVDB user mailing list
5) Update regarding PointPartitioning/PointMerging
6) Proposal for alternative workflow for external contributors
7) Dev analytics
8) Timeline for deprecating Makefiles
9) Meeting with Framestore regarding I/O of custom leaf node meta data
10) Next meeting

1) Quorum was confirmed.

2) Secretary was Dan Bailey

3) Road map / AX

Nick has a concrete list of things to do before making a feature branch for AX.
Intention is to send a list of qs to TSC with links to the documentation.
Extensibility is a key concern currently. Priority is to send a full language
spec to the TSC as a google doc for discussion. Implementation completion aiming
for end of Feb/March.

Going through the rest of the Road Map tabled for a later meeting. Ken wishes us
to make this a recurring topic.

4) OpenVDB user mailing list

Discussion about migrating from Google Groups to groups.io openvdb-user mailing
list, most LF projects now using groups.io and general feeling that this would
be a good thing to do. Desire to maintain content history during migration, John
thinks that is not a problem. Open question about whether to merge openvdb-dev
and openvdb-user, but general feeling that both have their uses. Auto-migration
of mailing list not generally considered a good idea and this can be used as a
chance to cull mailing addresses that are no longer in use. Embedding the panel
in the OpenVDB website important but not a blocking issue, John to contact
groups.io people about how to achieve this.

5) Update regarding PointPartitioning/PointMerging

Dan starting to submit small PRs to build towards this effort, request for more
code reviews.

6) Proposal for alternative workflow for external contributors

Dan is suggesting that we set the default branch to something else (develop?)
instead of master so that by default, external contributors are not making their
contributions directly into the master branch of the repository. This gives us a
chance to tweak contributions, add release notes, etc then submit our own PR
from develop back to master which will run additional CI checks. TSC members
will still have the right to make PRs directly into master. The TSC member that
approves an external PR should also be the one that prepares the PR into master,
intention is that the changes do not live on develop for long. Open question
from Nick about permissions regarding making PRs into master. General agreement
to the idea, Dan to flesh out a proposal with more details.

7) Dev analytics

John shared the LF efforts with dev analytics
(https://lfanalytics.io/projects/ad847f51-3046-4989-b500-f5237ecd49d0/dashboard).
Some questions about what is the best metric to use, it primarily relies on Git
commits at present, but lines of code also not an ideal metric.

8) Timeline for deprecating Makefiles

Still a list of outstanding items for CMake, desire to formalize which are
required for us to move away from supporting the old Makefile build system. Need
a warning when you use the old Makefiles. Jeff / SideFX still relying on the old
Makefiles for now, Ken occasionally uses them.

9) Meeting with Framestore regarding I/O of custom leaf node meta data

Proposed date for 16th January to discuss storing min/max mipmap data for delta
tracking for rendering. Ken to reach out to Framestore as they are believed to
already have an implementation of this to confirm a meeting date. Intention is
to add other interested parties to this meeting and focus on this one issue -
Pixar, SideFX, etc.

10) Next meeting

January 9th 2020. 2pm-3pm EST (GMT-5).
