Minutes from 4th OpenVDB TSC meeting, Dec. 13, 2018

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

A quorum was confirmed.

Secretary - Dan Bailey.

3) Decision on coding guidelines. Ken initially suggested a policy of at least one code owner should
approve every commit, Jeff raised that a best practice would be better so that simple reformatting
commits wouldn't require approval and that a commit that touched lots of areas of code wouldn't then
require every TSC member to approve. It was agreed that this was a better approach. In lieu of
demoting this from being a policy, a cooling-off period was suggested as a best practice to allow
time for feedback to be gathered, particularly from code owners. 72 hours was proposed as the
recommended time to wait. With these additional changes, the TSC members present unanimously agreed
on merging the proposed code review guidelines.

4) Decision on questions for Autodesk. Ken will send out a final email with questions shortly. The
hope is that after the initial information gathering, that this can turn into a back-and-forth
discussion to find out the best way to proceed here.

5) Update on merge permission for TSC members. All TSC members now have write access except Nick.
Dan to loop Nick into the Linux help desk ticket to follow up. In addition to write access, this now
opens up the ability to add requested reviewers and to approve pull requests. However it is
understood the Linux Foundation (ie Thanh) are the only ones with Admin permissions, so the TSC
members will need to communicate with them for adjusting repository settings (such as enforcing the
code review policies).

6) Latest update on plan for version 6.0.0. The ABI 6 pull request has already been merged in by
Peter in preparation for a release. All present agreed on moving forward with doing a soft release
for 6.0.0 to be compliant with the VFX Reference Platform for next year and then to follow up with
an announcement in January, once Peter has had a chance to update the website. This will include a
couple of outstanding pull requests such as the H17 fixes from Nick and a change to minor change
remove a test function suggested by Ken. The process for doing the release is to update the list of
changes and to send round to all TSC members to review before tagging the release. Once the release
has been tagged, a subsequent update will then mark the codebase in development once again and to
bump the version to 6.1.0 which is planned to be a big release with many more updates to come! A
follow-on discussion to be had about software dependency deprecations.

7) Misc. OpenVDB won a Luminaire Tech award from the Advanced Imaging Society! John joined the call
towards the end and brought up the recent discussions held by the TAC about licensing for DCC
dependencies. Jeff clarified that SideFX's recommendation is to use a Houdini Apprentice license and
highlighted that there is a Linux standard license exception that approves including code from a
third-party in released binaries and headers.

8) Our next TSC meeting is scheduled for Thursday Jan 3, 2018 2pm-3pm.
