AWSF TAC Meeting - March 11, 2020

Video Conference Link

Voting member attendance

Other Attendees

Emily Olin (Linux Foundatino)
Andrew Grimberg (Linux Foundation Release Engineering)
Dan Bailey (ILM)
JT Nelson (Pasadena Open Source consortium / SoCal Blender group)
Jeff Bradley (DreamWorks)
Andy Biar (Warner Bros. Storytelling Technology Innovation)
Mitch Prater (Laika)
Tiago Chaves (GSoC student)
Carson Brownlee (Intel)
Robin Rowe

Apologies

Cary Phillips, OpenEXR Representative

Agenda

Goals for TAC: Year 2
Emily: starting planning for SIGGRAPH, contingent to current COVID-19 situation, there will be a contingency plan / online only if needed. Looking at feedback on last year’s Open Source, originally thinking on Sunday, now looking at Monday (full / single day). Last year the day was packed, can’t pack everything into a single day. Looking at shorter BoFs or 2 tracks (with non overlapping interests).
USD Working Group (Cory)
- Cory: Well attended first call last Wednesday, minutes will be posted soon. Went over aims of the USD WG with the USD leads. Template as written right now is as specific as we would want it to be. Desire for collaborative development, also a schema working group. Trying to make sure these are currently not in scope as per the template document. Main focus is driving adoption and defining best practices, as well as assistance with support on existing channels (usd-interest mailing list).
- Repository has been set up: https://github.com/AcademySoftwareFoundation/wg-usd
- Next meeting (50m) set for next Wednesday, more time to discuss aspects of formation, should be able to come up with consensus as to where the WG is going.
- Should be possible to announce WG to usd-interest list soon, didn’t want to end up with too many people on the original call.
- Does it make sense to discussion on the usd-interest list rather than the tac list?
- General feedback is that this first meeting went well.
Python 3 Working Group? (Daniel)
- Daniel: still looking for someone to lead Python 3 WG, a few people are working on answers to Daniel based on their respective organization
- Larry: do we have an “elevator pitch” as to what the working group is trying to do?
- Daniel: lots of individual efforts from studios on efforts to port to Python 3, would be useful to share the results of some of these efforts, libraries / modules that were written. Create an environment where we can go beyond just Python 3 support in ASWF projects.
- LA Pipeline meetup planed on Python 3 on 25-March
- Daniel: significant effort was required. Cory: NVIDIA helping with USD, trying to get code to be compatible with 2 and 3, using Python Futurize. Some time in late spring / early summer plan to be building dependency chain including Python 3. Process is planned, not expecting to switch active productions until 2020H2 or 2021H1. Depending on external DCCs of course. Henry: So far has been a semi ad-hoc approach, I’m bringing in a project lead for this project who starts end-of-March who may be a candidate to lead the ASWF WG.
Repository access levels (Dan / Andy)
- Dan: was discussed extensively in CI WG. We are looking at trying to eliminate some of the back and forth with LF releng group and make debugging easier. Not possible to see how repos are configured. 2 specific areas:
  - Adding and editing secret variables (specifically for download of Houdini)
  - Modify branch protection rules: number of approvals, mandatory vs optional checks.
- PR
- Andy: back and forth on the PR, general agreement from lf releng, just needs TAC review / approval, some sort of vote.
- Dan: maintainer level doesn’t give much above write level privileges.
- Henry: are there specific privileges you get with admin that are required?
- JF: you need a token with administrative permissions to generate a registration-token to allow self-hosted runners to register with GitHub Actions
- Dan: will use caching to work around some of the issues of not having access to secrets in branches
- Daniel: calling for vote. No dissenting, Eric abstains as not active in CI. Motion passes. Thank you to Dan and Andrew for moving this forward.
Google Summer of Code Update (Larry)
- Some of the lists have seen some requests from some students.
- Michael Dolan: 2 students working on proposals on OCIO, will be reviewed with mentors before they submit official proposals. Tackling issues put up on GitHub, following requirements in the outline, and creating PRs. Time of submission is approaching quickly.
- Larry: may be the first time that OCIO accepts a PR from someone who isn’t a well known member of the color science community, hopefully will also happen on the other projects. Deadline in a couple of weeks, then we have a couple of weeks to respond to Google with how many slots we feel should get sponsored, and designate mentors to pair.
- Daniel: hopefully this can help to make our projects somewhat easier to engage with.
- Larry: what does it take to get a somewhat more junior person from outside the community to contribute.
- Michael: a couple of PRs included code that hadn’t been compiled before.
CI updates
- Working group
  - GPU agents (JF)
    - Supports AWS / GCP / Azure
    - Uses Terraform cloud for persistent state
    - Runs on Azure Pipelines and GitHub Actions
    - GitHub Actions: lack of “secret files” means workarounds for ssh private keys (encode LFs as _), GITHUB_TOKEN doesn’t have administrative privileges and cannot be used to generate runner registration token, need to generate specific PAT
  - Daniel: what would be the minimal steps required from projects and lf-releng to bring this into project builds.
  - Andrew: has not had a chance to look at it in detail. There are secrets involved. Should we focus on GitHub Actions or Azure Pipelines? Will need a request to the helpdesk for the cloud keys. Discussions with GitHub on secrets in fork: secrets management in forks is coming, will be possible in the future. Also possible to limit running CI runs based on approval from project maintainers. Hopefully can designate some contributors as being able to run CI workflows without approval. Jenkins has more protection for workflows than GitHub Actions. We don’t want PRs that can modify code and workflows at the same time, they should be different PRs.
  - Dan: GitHub allows modifying which branch a PR ends up, so could point to an integration branch, and only run the GPU testing. Could use a comment / tag to trigger a GPU test run.
  - Daniel: how do we integrate offer from some of the ASWF member companies (cloud providers), can they be managed in a single pool through lf-releng, or through a sub pool. Andrew: no easy answer, especially for AWS due to how billing works. May need to be fleshed out offline.
Project Updates
- OpenShadingLanguage adoption (Larry)
  - Looks like a quorum to get a TSC started, took some back and forth with some of the stakeholders
  - Trying to schedule a first meeting
  - There are a couple of gaps we have: we don’t have great coverage for people who really know Windows, this has plagued the project all along. Also the list of potential contributors severely lacks diversity, so if anyone has suggestions, please contact Larry. Would be nice to broaden the scope of voices participating and actively participating in the project. Hoping that some of the TSC members become developers.
Update on candidate projects
- Rez: would need to be relicensed with a more ASWF-compatible license, which is a non trivial effort.
Next meeting
- 25 March 2020

AWSF TAC Meeting - March 11, 2020

Voting member attendance

Other Attendees

Apologies

Agenda

Action Items (AIs)

Notes

Chat