Minutes from 29th OpenVDB TSC meeting, October 10th, 2019, (GMT)

Attendees: *Nick* A., *Dan* B., *Jeff* L., *Ken* M.
Additional: John Metric, Daniel Elliot.
Regrets: *Peter* C.

Agenda:

1) Confirm quorum
2) Select TSC member to take minutes

1) Quorum was confirmed.

2) Secretary was Jeff Lait

3) 18.0 Update

18.0 has updated to the core 6.2.0 library with the patch.  It should, however, be updated to 6.2.1 to minimize confusion about versions.  Node changes still have not been merged.

4) C++14

C++14 doesn't currently compile in 7.0, but it should.  Dan has a PR active to fix this.

5) Interpolator Proposal

This is still outstanding.  Ken is planning submitting Jira tickets about the proposal.   This includes a few different things: curvature, fast sweeping, node count, etc.

It was pointed out that any new Jira ticket requires explictly adding all of the TSC as watchers.

6) ABI=7 and 7.0 Release

We want to maximize our ABI changes in this window.  7.0 will close off in the early December timeframe at the latest.

Do we want an extra 64-bit word in the leaf node?  This can be useful for building references to external caches without hashmaps.  But a 32-bit integer may also suffice, and might fit in existing padding rules of the coordinates.   Likewise, there may be enough that we can trim away.  For example, we store separate offsets for the Value Mask and Value Offsets for a disk file, but these are now contiguous.  Indeed, we might be able to union those with the blind data as live algorithsm shouldn't need them.

We have a ticket with the ABI7 label to track the various stuff we couldn't do over the year due to ABI.  Dan will send a link of all 4.   Some are easy, but one of note is that you can't do a shallow copy of a tree and update the meta data or transform without doing a const cast.

Attribute Array seems to produce lots of warnings in ABI 7.  This is under latest OSX clang.

7) CLA Easy Engaged

This has been turned on so we can beging to find out how things work.

8) Windows CI

There is a PR to enable python tests, but Windows is not building the python plugin.  It is suggested the python module should be optional by default, like the Houdini and Maya support.  Consensus was to disable by default so people can get a build, then add python.

9) CMake

Will look into improvements on default paths.

10) Mesh to Volume non determinism

Nick wishes someone other than himself to verify this does fail, so he can rule out hardware or some strange configuration issue on his end.

It appears to be isolated to the prim id tree.  Next stage may be to remove thread local storage in case it is TBB non-re-entrancy.  Valgrind or Address Sanitizer in Clang might be useful.

11) Next Meeting

Next planned meeting:

October 17th 2019. 3pm-4pm EDT (GMT-4).
