Minutes from 18th OpenVDB TSC meeting, May 30, 2019

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

Additional Attendees: John Mertic (LF)

Regrets: We have no regrets.

Agenda:

1) Quorum Secretary
2) Secretary Selection
3) CI Update (Dan)
4) CLA Update (John)
Non-Planned A) Siggraph
Non-Planned B) Floodgates
5) Mainline Remote Branches (Nick)
6) Switch to Relative Header Paths (Peter)
7) OpHiding Next Steps (Dan)
8) GitHub Issues Cleanup / Process for Submitting Bug Reports (Nick/Jeff)
9) VDB Delayed Loading (Dan)
10) Maya Plugin (Nick)
11) Level Target Pruning/Voxelization (Nick)
12) Speed of hasActiveTiles/voxelizeActiveTiles (Nick)
13) Schedule Next Meeting

1) A quorum was confirmed

2) Secretary - Jeff Lait

3) General concerns and remarks about the project (Ken/Peter)

A wide ranging discussion about the state and purpose of the VDB
project was held.  The rate of PRs has made it difficult to
adequately review them, and people are feeling rushed into
approval.   There also doesn't seem to be any real "meat" to
show for all the PRs - the 6.0 and 6.1 releases don't seem
to generate a lot of attention to users as they seem to involve
no new exciting features.

We agreed it would be good to use the TSC meetings to discuss
upcoming plans rather than administration.  In particular,
we could prioritize what features are coming rather than just
having them appear suddenly.

Different opinions are held on whether a release needs to have
any major features.  The majority opinion holds that the users
don't care about version numbers, so we shouldn't hold ourselves
to any release cadence.  The minority feels that without press-release
relevant features VDB may fall out of favour.

We agreed that part of the TSC meetings should be dedicatd to
actual feature discussion.  One proposal was to alternate the purpose,
another was to have a fixed timeslot reserved for this to avoid
being crowded out.

It is acknowledged that some PRs will inevitably come out of the
blue as they are from production rather than TSC needs.  Likewise,
bug fixes are unlikely to have any advanced notice.  But where
possible we would like all feature PRs to be announced at a TSC
meeting to give the other members an advanced notice of what
might be coming down the pipe.

It is planned to do explicit roadmap discussion at Siggraph this year.

4) Plans for v6.2 (all)

No precise date is present at the moment.  Siggraph is still a
tentative date.  Integration with Houdini++ likely requires
a release around that date.

It is expected that AX will exist as a feature branch by that point.

Action Item: TSC members are to make a short list of contributions
they plan for Siggraph by next meeting.

Non-Planned A) Siggraph

The course appears to be a go ahead, the issues with course
notes seems to have been addressed.

There will be a Birds of the Feather with two blocks devoted
to VDB.

Non-Planned B) Floodgates

It was noted that if we start getting external contributions, we
should keep in mind to groom potential future maintainers.

5) Response to Autodesk (Ken)

Not done yet.  Being worked on.  Should meet with them at Siggraph.

6) Memory pools and custom allocators (Ken)

Should we add memory pools and custom allocators to our
tree structures?   Useful for host/device and out-of-core computations.
Needs to be somehow backwards compatible.

7) CII badge status (John M)

It is important not to overthink these badges.

The bug reporting would likely be solved by Nick's planned progress.

No one wants to volunteer to be known as the security expert.

MITM attacks are likely handled by github's distribution model.

8-12) Time

13) Schedule Next Meeting

June 6th 2019.  3pm-4pm EDT (GMT-4).
