ASWF TAC Meeting - April 24, 2019

Voting member attendance

Apologies

Bill Ballew, DreamWorks (represented by Jeff Bradley)

Other Attendees

Andrew Grimberg (Linux Foundation)
Cary Phillips (OpenEXR Representative)
Mark Elendt (Side Effects)
Doug Walker (Autodesk)
Emily Olin (Linux Foundation)
Kevin Wheatley (Framestore)
Jeff Bradley (Dreamworks)
Robert Vinluan (SideFX)
Mike Dolan (Linux Foundation)

Agenda

Goals for TAC: Year 1
- Progress on CI goals
- Can we find useful projects to bring in to meet our 6 project goal. We need to accelerate the process on this. Does this cause dilution of effort?
- JF: should different problems be tasked with trying to solve different aspects of what needs to be done to become a full fledged ASWF project.
- Larry: rate of acceptance can be problematic when all projects are in the same phase. The “steady state” of accepting new projects will be less taxing.
- Daniel: adding new projects adds resources and are a net gain rather than a dilution of resources.
- Gordon: how could we demonstrate the benefit of the foundation by demonstrating what we’ve done with the existing projects rather than concentrating on getting additional projects (was goal of 6 projects somewhat arbitrary?). When ASWF was set up, wanted to solve the cross platform issues for one thing, are we happy with where we’ve gotten so far?
- Eric: should ask individual project leads “what has the ASWF made easier”? “What are the next 2 things you expect from ASWF?”
- Gordon: could do this as a SurveyMonkey of the ASWF project leads, and also for the ASWF members. That should give us a good idea of where to focus our energies.
- Larry: SPI has other projects it can submit, haven’t been in a hurry to do this, given that the projects already in the queue are consuming a lot of bandwidth (CII badge, CI system, security…). Amount of work required to push the next project in will be a lot lower once the existing projects have solved those issues. Feels that this may be a thought in the heads of other people managing projects that could be potential candidates.
- Daniel: consensus seems to be we should “clear the pipe” first, agrees with Gordon’s suggestion to consult with projects / members.
- Larry: once OCIO gets all these requirements worked out, we will have a good story to tell, will be able to show all the benefits that OCIO got out of being part of the organization.
- Cary: ultimate is to the users of the project, so a year from now hopefully people out in the community should be able to say “OpenEXR is so much easier to use” (for instance). Benefits to the maintainers is secondary benefit / means to an end.
- Daniel: does this stretch to “easily instalable builds on every platform” for instance? Cary: yes, but also release cadence, number of outstanding pull requests, “this library is of greater value to the community than if the foundation had come along”.
- Eric: coordination is also a good thing, picking standard components (linear algebra libraries for instance). Does adoption increase because of ASWF membership, giving confidence in longevity.
Governing Board meeting update
- Meeting yesterday
- Discussion was mostly recap of process of accepting OpenCue and OpenEXR as incubation projects
- Reviewed discussions of incubation stage vs graduation, what that means for the other projects in Foundation at this stage (see PR update)
- Interesting news for upcoming events (SIGGRAPH)
Lifecycle doc updates
- PR
- Need to support well established projects as well as new/upcoming projects
- “Be deemed by the TAC to add potential or value to the mission of ASWF. “ : any suggestions for alternative wording to “add potential”?
- We want to send a clear message in answer to questions about any projects outside of the “obvious candidates”
- Doug: comment on “Graduation Review”. Should CII Badge requirement be part of that discussion?
- Daniel: trying to restart efforts for security analysis
- PR should be a prompt for discussion, not final result.
- Need language about potential exit of project, “no fault / no damage” exit process. Not easy to specify in detail (discussion prompted by Larry).
LF CommunityBridge Intro
- Video
Technical Project updates
- OpenVDB
  - Daniel: more work to establish CircleCI as alternative CI system to previous Travis / AppVeyor, doesn’t necessarily preclude future shift to Azure or other system.
  - Work to bring up other best practices such as updates to project copyright header, spdx headers
  - Large potential contribution from Autodesk for large, multi-resolution grid system, interesting but challenging contribution
- OpenColorIO
  - Starting to investigate SonarCloud integration (temporarily using SPI account)
  - Working towards CII badge: setting up vulnerability report project security@opencolorio.org which forwards to private OCIO TSC mailing list
  - Will have additional point releases prior to next VFX reference platform, which currently says 1.1.x
  - CLA system is up and running. Larry starting to investigate, moving towards repo transfer to ASWF
  - Sean Cooper will be representing OCIO on ACES TAC to connect both projects (since they are tightly coupled)
  - Daniel: have details of license scan been cleared up? Mike: not yet. Some external dependencies need to be cleared up, may need to revisit timeline / allocate more resources. Larry: mostly a function of developer bandwidth? Mike: yes.
  - Daniel: great to see practical steps being made on security requirements.
  - JF: does it make sense to extend security reporting infrastructure to every project, make it “the way to report security issues for ASWF project”?
  - Mike: investigated several projects that have CI badge (for instance Blender), many don’t support private reporting. Agrees it would make sense to have a standard approach.
  - Daniel: would make sense to create a pattern, test it, and if we like it extend it across multiple projects.
- OpenCue
  - Brian: not too much done yet, final approval went through not long ago
  - Next steps are to officially start the TSC and schedule meetings. Is there an “official process” for that? Daniel: this is covered in technical charter, John can provide help / guidance.
  - Jenkins migration is furthest along, looks promising so far, should be straightforward.
  - Should have more to discuss at next meeting.
- OpenEXR
  - Carey Philipps to be representative for now
  - Sent online poll to steering committee
CI updates
- CI platform comparison
  - Andy: discussion around OpenCue using current LF Jenkins platform, sent info to Brian, info was useful.
  - SonarCloud: had discussion with Michael Dolan about OpenColorIO, we haven’t transferred ownership of the repo yet (still under SPI), so we can connect it to ASWF SonarCloud org. Will be working out documentation.
  - ASWF Azure Pipelines org created, need to pay for GPU. Can you invite individual contributors to the organization? For now need to use Microsoft accounts.
  - Will probably need some kind of sandbox setup to allow projects to experiment with the CI system
  - Was an issue in Jenkins system before a sandbox was added (sandbox gets “purged” every week)
  - Daniel: hoping for a mostly DevOps like setup, rather than a lot of configuration that lives inside the CI system. Should be able to use a PR-style approach to managing CI configuration.
  - Andrew: Linux Foundation is likely to be in charge that a repo is properly connected to a CI system.
- CII badge
  - Static analysis
  - Security
    - John Mertic reaching out to CII badge program leaders to get more info
    - Daniel: reaching out to people who offered to help with security issues
Candidate projects
SIGGRAPH
- Emily Olin: director of communications at LF
- https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1N_dB78EFZRdEi2qKWJEykaPP-swTqZFFwtzLcV5wxIw/edit?usp=sharing
- Face to Face TAC meeting
- Project BoFs and TSC meetings
- First day is Digipro, submissions due May 3, some kind of sponsorship level contemplated
- Sunday Pipeline conference, 100/200 people in Downtown LA, looking for speakers.
- Also sponsoring SIGGRAPH Diversity and Inclusion summit
- 3:30 to 4:30 Monday ASWF Overview BoF
- 6:00 to 8:00 Beers of a Feather at Prank Bar
- Tuesday: Trying to organize a Open Source Track for BoFs
- Including projects outside of ASWF
- Wednesday: Board Meeting, perhaps in person TAC meeting
- Looking at inviting leaders of outside projects
- Slots for individual ASWF projects
- Kimball: are these replacing the traditional BoFs? Yes, working with SIGGRAPH organizers to bring together the open source BoFs. Trying to make it easier, avoid having to run back and forth between locations.
- May become an “official” Open Source track in 2020.
- Doug: Tuesday sessions would be outward facing updates to the outside work, Wednesday sessions would be for internal project issues? Emily: yes, Wednesday sessions are for smaller group, projects can decide what they want to do with those sessions.
- Doug: last year OpenColorIO working session was 2hrs, so 1hr may not be sufficient, may need to schedule another hour somewhere else? Emily: lunch hour may be available.
- Emily: please share any other talks related to ASWF so they can be coordinated and/or promoted
- Emily: also looking for presenters at other technical conferences.
- Daniel: next step to provide feedback to Emily about schedule, and confirmations from each project.
- Daniel: Emily can help to publicize project releases
Next meeting: 8 May 2019

Action Items (AIs)

Notes

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