Minutes from 51st OpenVDB TSC meeting, May 28st, 2020, (EDT)

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

Additional Attendees:

JT Nelson (Blender), Bruce Chernia (Intel), Andre Pradhana (DWA),
Peter Cheng (DWA), Robin Rowe (Cinepaint), Johannes Meng (Intel),
Ibrahim Sani (DWA)

Regrets: *Peter* C.

Agenda:

1) Confirm quorum
2) Secretary
3) Forum
4) PR Review
5) houdini_utils
6) Paraview
7) Next Meeting


1) Quorum was confirmed.

2) Secretary was Dan Bailey

3) Forum

Ken replied to a recent post about AMR.

4) PR Review

* PR 719 - Dan gave an overview of the caching workflow and the motivation. All
agreed with the strategy of running the scheduled cache job until it is
successful then switching on the reading of the caches in a subsequent PR. To
be merged this week.

* PR 720 - ABI=4 support removed with this PR. Should really deprecate ABI=5 in
preparation for removal next year. However, many studios still using ABI=5,
particularly for Houdini 17.5 so marking this deprecated will likely encourage
users to add the OPENVDB_USE_DEPRECATED_ABI flag to their builds. Not
remembering to remove this flag risks users not being made aware of future
deprecations if they aren't closely monitoring compiler warnings. Decision is
to change the compiler flag to OPENVDB_USE_DEPRECATED_ABI_5 so that the next
ABI flag will need to be explicitly added to turn compiler errors into
warnings as a result of using a deprecated ABI.

* PR 722 - This needs to be merged before AX can be introduced to VDB.

* PR 723 - Instantiating matrix grid types needs to work. Introducing a
cwiseCmp() method to the value type reduces chance of comparing matrix /
vectors incorrectly, but requires all types to have it (PointIndex, etc). This
is needed by the prune Grid method which should ultimately be deprecated in
favour of the prune tool. Ideal implementation would be a prune method that
takes a custom functor. The tuple type which vec types are derived from have
the less than operator, so matrix types should do too.

5) houdini_utils

Brief outline of the proposed plan here and potential impact on DWA of
deprecating this. Discussion to continue through email.

6) Paraview

Paraview are introducing VDB support. MPI distribution is one of the key
features.

7) Next Meeting

May 28st 2020. 2pm-3pm EDT (GMT-4).
