Minutes from 35th OpenVDB TSC meeting, December 5, 2019, (GMT)

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

Additional Attendees: Andrew Pearce (DreamWorks), Daneil Elliot (Weta)

Regrets: *Peter* C.

Agenda:

1) Confirm quorum
2) Secretary
3) Outstanding 7.0 Items
4) PR568
5) PR578
6) Optional build dependencies/Thread pools and TBB
7) VDB Merge SOP 
8) Roadmap discussion
9) OpenVDB Blog post by Emily
10) Website Logos

1) Quorum was confirmed.

2) Secretary was Nick Avramoussis

Update by Andrew with TSC recommendations from DreamWorks. The TSC has discussed
with Peter C his desired involvement going forward, with the plan being to wait
a few months to gauge how active Peter would be. Andrew confirmed that no one at
DreamWorks is currently in a position to replace Peter as a TSC member. All
members of the TSC express lots of interest for more people to contribute to all
levels of the project.

3) Outstanding 7.0 Items

An issue exists with PR 536 (merged), where virtual methods introduced to the
Tree have not been guarded in an ABI clause. This produces crashes when VDBs
created in other applications prior to these changes are passed to custom
builds. These needs to be fixed before the 7.0 release. Ken to fix and push up
changes, Nick to release once this has been tested and confirmed. All members in
agreement that we should investigate ABI tests (OVB-118).

4) PR568

Needs an additional approval before merge.

5) PR578

Houdini 18 now requires a license when certain functions from its CMake modules
are used (as they run hython). Our CI can work around this by manually providing
an install path. Questions raised whether using hython here is necessary.

6) Optional build dependencies/Thread pools and TBB

It would be nice if as many as possible of OpenVDB's dependencies were optional
(tbb, zlib, ilmbase, openexr, boost are not). Specifically with TBB,
generalizing our threading infrastructure would be extremely useful. A shared
utility header/some other type of higher level abstraction providing common
macros/links which can be used to implement custom schedulers or even completely
disable threading would help provide more custom control over multi-threaded
methods. Note that the C++ committee is currently working on a TBB "replacement"
(executors), but this is not expected to arrive until C++20.

7) VDB Merge SOP

Dan proposing a merge SOP which merges all types of volumes. This could
incorporate a subset of the combine SOPs features, the most obvious of which
would be union type functionality. There currently exists a Vector Merge SOP
which will be confusing. Initial TSC reaction positive, Dan to put together a
more detailed proposal.

8) Roadmap discussion

Discussion to be delayed until after release. AX mentioned as a significant
contribution, Nick is looking to priorities this.

9) OpenVDB Blog post by Emily

Not many exciting things to include for a blog post bar those we've already
mentioned. Consensus was that if we could wait until next year that would be
ideal.

10) Website Logos

Consensus that we shouldn't shy away from reaching out to companies who release
software with VDB support with logo requests. The VFX platform logo should be
last on the list on the website. Ken to reach out to some vendors.

11) Next planned meeting is:

December 19th 2019. 2pm-3pm EST (GMT-5).
