AWSF TAC Meeting - August 14, 2019

Voting member attendance

Other Attendees

Andrew Grimberg, The Linux Foundation
John Mertic, The Linux Foundation
Doug Walker, Autodesk / OpenColorIO

Agenda

Welcome new members [0:00 - 0:10]
- Sean McDuffee (Intel)
  - Working with Jim Jeffries, used to be at Blue Sky in R&D dept, working on rendering and simulation, 8 shows over last 10 years. Joined Intel 2 months ago, enthusiastic about ASWF.
- Pilar Molina (Blue Sky Studios)
  - Senior Software Engineer in R&D Dept, works with Mark McGuire, animation and rigging tools, has worked closely with Animal Logic and Autodesk on Maya/USD
- Michael Min (Netflix)
  - Will be representing Netflix on the TAC, will get up to speed on the documentation, based in the LA office.
SIGGRAPH recap [0:10 - 0:20]
- ASWF BoF
  - John: feedback from attendees, we had around 300-400 attendees, very satisfying turnout, great work from Emily on organization. At lot of great engagement questions. Demographics profile: beers of a feather: 50/50 split between familiar/involved with ASWF and new, similar profile for Open Source Day. Plurality of attendees not involved in specific projects, getting lots of new people “in the room”, individual projects need to work on bringing in some of these new people. Highest priorities perceived: build/CI environment, versionitis, shared legal framework. Most “popular” projects which should become ASWF projects: USD, OIIO, Rez, OpenSubdiv, ACES… Strong interest in an open source media player, metadata initiatives, imath as a standalone project… Also very strong interest in tighter connection between ASWF and VFX Reference Platform, as well as focussing on documentation.
  - Sean: are we expecting to pick some topics and create working groups? Daniel: yes, we can create working groups to address some specific topics such as documentation, but for something like a media player, other models may be more effective, for instance identify a specific existing project or product that could be adopted / supported / open sourced. Kimball: there are several media players, we should identify what specific features we need (scripting for instance)
- OSS Maintainers meeting
  - Larry (meeting host): several maintainers of other projects in our ecosystem, as well as leaders of ASWF projects. Somewhat informal discussion on “hot topics”, 2 main take aways:
    - A good chance to get people from other projects to see what ASWF can do (especially CI system) without it being a “selling opportunity”
    - Discussion centered around general problems faced by all projects: how to keep a healthy level of developer contribution, especially from studios using the project. Also recruiting, and how to encourage some diversity, how do you get new blood coming into the projects, all projects are facing the same types of issues.
  - Daniel: some good examples from other projects of useful initiatives:
    - Cloud Native Compute Foundation: https://landscape.cncf.io/
    - Effort to revive “Open Source VFX” web site
    - Examples of documentation: project level, as well as cross project initiatives
  - For non-ASWF projects: looking for high resolution logos to replace PNGs with SVGs (for scalability), to update Open Source VFX web site
  - Imageworks has some projects that aren’t on the Open Source VFX web site, would be good to get updates on these projects so they can be added
  - BoF videos will be up on YouYube in a few days
- TAC retrospective and prospective
  - Security experts (Sean, Kimball)
    - Kimball: Dan Hutchison was working as security engineer before The Foundry, has offered to help
    - Sean: looking for additional context on how to engage with group of security experts, should this be a working group with ad hoc cadence, or something less formal. Daniel: will work with Sean to come up with a working model, we tried a few different approaches early on, but were lacking the resources back then.
Technical Project updates [0:20 - 0:45]
- OpenCue
  - Gathering feedback from SIGGRAPH to merge into project plan
  - Ramping up new TSC members, having design discussions
  - Priority to make progress on CII badge, initial pass is complete. Static analysis / SonarCloud setup in progress, also working on increasing test coverage. CII badge is forcing emphasis on test coverage, which is great.
  - Velocity on accepting external contributions is not as high as desired due to lack of test coverage.
  - Chatting with Linux Foundation RelEng to merge with ASWF SonarCloud org instead of using personal one.
  - Have we agreed on the general level of test coverage required for CII badge? Have any of the other projects set a benchmark? Michael: OCIO aiming for 80%, Kimball: OpenEXR at 82%. Brian: 80% sounds like a place to start.
  - Starting to use ASWF base Docker Images, nothing in there covers Java / JDK, should there be? Daniel: a good topic for the CI working group? (CI working group not wrapped up, just looking at necessary cadence going forward)
- OpenTimelineIO
  - Cory: no specific updates, back from vacation, need to follow up with Josh to gather SIGGRAPH feedback, questions on how to form the TSC. Will update at the next meeting. Daniel: has been involved in a couple of conversations.
- OpenColorIO
  - Michael: completed all the requirements to pass license scan, except for some exceptions that need to be approved by governing board. John: agreed, overall in pretty good shape.
  - Michael: some work on updating licensing statements in source code, such as using SPDX. When is it OK to replace copyright notices? Will talk to Autodesk and Imageworks to see if those statements can be completely replaced.
  - Ready to move project over to ASWF GitHub org, but waiting for some CLAs to be signed, don’t want project to get blocked because of those.
- OpenVDB
  - No representatives on call
- OpenEXR
  - Kimball: narrowing down last few bugs to get Azure Pipelines running on all 3 platforms, will then tag for 2.4.0 release.
  - Added a couple of static functions, thus 2.4.0, hopefully by Labor Day
  - 95% on CII badge
  - Daniel: any further discussion on “imath library extraction” based on SIGGRAPH feedback? Kimball: no further discussions past SIGGRAPH in OpenEXR TSC. Larry: might want to extend the discussion to the TAC, and maybe take a specific position? Daniel: seems that CI integration / next release are the current priorities.
  - Eric: what was the specific feedback at the BoF regarding this split? Larry: no extensive discussion at the BoF, the vector/matrix stuff wasn’t controversial, but should we also split off “half”, is there an alternative FP16 format to be supported? Machine Learning apps tend to use a different format (that was new information). Not ready to elevate that to the TAC level.
  - Larry: need to make sure that anything that is done with Half is compatible with what happens in CUDA.
CI updates [0:45 - 0:50]
- Working group goals / cadence
  - Migration into ASWF orgs from personal (Sonar etc)
    - Access privileges
    - Andy: Brian requested connecting up Sonar Cloud, best to do this via tickets, but will create “committer groups” that will have admin rights for their repositories.
    - Also “Self service committer promotion”, can automate via a YAML files. Trying to standardize between Gerrit and GitHub.
    - Andy: Can add marketplace apps that can help with that.
    - Andy: self service repository creation via adding a file to a “control” repo, would help ASWF be more agile without having to rely on RelEng group for some of these connections / infrastructure.
  - Documentation
  - Base images: extend to include more components (e.g. Java)
  - Windows, Mac, GPU
  - Commercial components for build and test
  - Daniel: suggesting a monthly cadence for CI working group to make room for other initiatives
Update on candidate projects
- From survey results
  - Media player
    - Does anyone know the DJV people?
    - Larry: what do people want from a “media playback” tool? Do they really want a playback tool, or a collaborative dailies platform?
    - Sean: should we re-evaluate the survey, distill the data down to a new list, some kind of “mutually exclusive” results?
    - Larry: we don’t know who asked for this, not a single person at a studio. Hesitant to put a lot of time into something that got voted on somewhat casually.
    - Kimball: can we follow up with people who attended the events? Larry: at least post on the public TAC email list, if no one responds, then we probably don’t need to even think about it.
    - Gordon: do we know how many votes this got? Larry: not clear what that means. Gordon: how do we better act on this data.
    - John: can send the governing board slide deck to the TAC after this meeting. Also will post raw data as CSV.
    - Gordon: action item for next call to review the raw data?
    - John: we can also do a follow up larger survey to hone in better on what the data means.
  - John: talked to a few people as to what they meant by “metadata” answers: common interchange formats, common metadata interop between tools. Sean: also metadata captured on set and how to deal with that. But not clear what that means in the context of ASWF, and what that could translate to in practice.
  - John: “Documentation” should also be clarified.
  - Rez
  - Rigging / Evaluation
Next meeting
- 28 August 2019

Action Items (AIs)

Adding a OpenTimelineIO representative once TSC is formed
TAC chair position will be up for election next month, Daniel: happy to discuss with anyone who is interested in what is involved in the position

AWSF TAC Meeting - August 14, 2019

Voting member attendance

Agenda

Action Items (AIs)

Notes

Chat