Academy Software Foundation - Technical Advisory Council (TAC) Meeting - April 17, 2024

Join the meeting at https://zoom-lfx.platform.linuxfoundation.org/meeting/97880950229?password=81d2940e-c055-43b9-9b5a-6cd7d7090feb

Voting Representative Attendees

Premier Member Representatives

Project Representatives

Carol Payne - OpenColorIO Representative
Cary Phillips - OpenEXR Representative
Chris Kulla - Open Shading Language (OSL) Representative
Jonathan Stone - MaterialX Representative
Ken Museth - OpenVDB Representative

Industry Representatives

Jean-Francois Panisset - Visual Effects Society

Non-Voting Attendees

Non-Voting Project and Working Group Representatives

LF Staff

David Morin - Academy Software Foundation
Emily Olin - Academy Software Foundation
John Mertic - The Linux Foundation
Tom Slanda - The Linux Foundation
Yarille Ortiz - The Linux Foundation

Other Attendees

Ben Giles, Calligra
Daniel Heckenberg, Netflix
Spencer Stephens, MovieLabs
Bill Ballew, Dreamworks
Christian Wieberg-Nielsen
Deke Kincaid, Digital Domain
Dhruv Govil, Apple
Doug Walker, OCIO / Autodesk
Joe Bryant, Open 3D Engine Foundation
Lee Kerley, Sony Imageworks
Victor Lu

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Agenda

General Updates
- Volunteer for SLP 2024! #645
- Open Source Days 2024 #658
- Dev Days 2024 Participation #662
- Follow up discussions on new project proposals
  - Pillow #631
  - Swift WG #578
- Definition of TAC Chairperson Role #632
OpenEXR Annual Review #483
Rez Annual Review #492

Meeting Notes

SLP 2024 - Carol
- Deadline for reviewing applications has passed, we’re looking for mentors, guest mentors (fill in for vacation) and well as people for the Speaker Series.
TAC Chairperson Role - John
- Some comments in chat. Any concerns until we move forward?
- A number of people +! it.
- Carol: there’s probably more to flesh out in terms of what happens if the vice chair has to exit, do we hold a second election, does the vice chair have to serve a full year before they can become chair… So need more details.
- John: if there are no concerns, we’ll merge this and start working on an execution plan.
Pillow / Swift WG Proposal
- Do we want to block off some time?
- Larry: can we just do this now? John: is there more discussion? or are we just saying not for now?
- Carol: there are two different “stories”. For Pillow, if they can go off and come back with use cases in VFX? Larry: it doesn’t read EXR files… Kimball: should it merge with OIIO? Carol: it may not be worth ASWF time, we already have / use OIIO, so not a useful use of resources. John: any concerns with this as the feedback? Kimball: fine by me. John: will provide the feedback, we can always onboard them to Linux Foundation as unfunded projects.
- Swift WG: Carol haven’t read updates on discussion, would want to see who this would benefit, a couple of projects / companies to “sponsor” this WG and statement of participation. John: can provide feedback as well.
- Larry: these are 2 cases where project proposals came from outside our community (not member companies or projects, no one stepped forward to champion), given how tight the TAC schedule is, I am concerned about load of multiple project proposals. Should there be a bit of a “barrier”, come in with sponsorship of a project or member company with a commitment to participate. Don’t want people to just use ASWF as a stamp of approval for a project which may not be all that relevant. John: should we have a TAC vote to put on agenda? Larry: needing a TAC sponsor would be a good first step. David: TAC or member sponsor. Larry: TAC has representatives from all members? David: only premier members, not general members. John: I can put some wording on the lifecycle document. Larry: we don’t need to be too particular about who the sponsor is, but we want to make sure that project proposals are relevant first. John: will put something together for TAC review.
- Nick (chat): Did Rust WG get similar sponsorship? I’m not spotting how Rust & Swift differ here. Both have advocates in member companies, but neither is a bottom line investment for any member company, that I know of. Kimball: Was a different time, but a member org / representative did sponsor / propose that… Carol: Who are the advocates for swift? Apple? Anyone else? Nick: I mean beyond Apple, I don’t think Pixar is unique is using Swift in production. Carol: Cool, this is the info we’re looking for! Eric: I also wonder if Disney feature animation might have interest? Nick: Anyone doing work with Apple’s headset is using Swift. To your question Eric, it’s public record that Disney is working on a number of headset based projects. Scott: Yeah, when the Rust WG was approved, we had someone at Amazon be our sponsor, but I think he’s since left Amazon/the ASWF. Nick: So I’m just drawing a line between headset work and Swift as being interesting to ASWF member companies. Apple headsets of course, I acknowledge the existence of Meta. Dhruv: Might be a stretch, but quite a few of the member companies use apple products like Mac’s , phones etc and provide apps for them. Larry: The proposers of Rust WG were associated with member companies, and at least as importantly, were people known to us with a track record of getting things done useful to production. Dhruv: So as much of a rust fanboy as I am, I think swift is more applicable. Carol: Yeah this is useful. I am definitely not saying no to the swift wg, just asking for them to get a list of their proponents and who would be involved in making it a success before we vote to approve it. Larry: If somebody from Apple wants to be a major champion and participant in the WG, that totally changes the picture. Is it “we like if people use Swift”, or “we will be enthusiastic participants in the WG with our time and resources?”. Dhruv: I’ll discuss with Wave. Time is the hardest one since we are actively contributing to so many projects already. Perhaps we can revisit after WWDC24 because we get a pressure relief after that. Michael: I asked Tyler to try and get some other folks in the ASWF community to step forward to help drive it and show interest, but I haven’t heard anything on that. I’m happy to contribute if there is interest, but I haven’t seen it yet. I hope that changes this year, but we’ll have to wait and see.
XZ Security Follow Up - John
- One thing I forgot to mention - we will be holding a follow up meeting on the xz vulnerability and actions for ASWF projects on Monday at 12noon PT - register at Zoom call
OpenEXR Annual Review - Cary
- 2024 OpenEXR TAC Project Update
- “Glass Half Full”: admire the caustics in the image
- OpenEXR Project Mission
  - The goal of the OpenEXR project is to keep the EXR format reliable and modern and to maintain its place as the preferred image format for entertainment content creation.
  - …
- Steering Committee
- OpenEXR/Imath Releases
  - Last TAC Update end of 2022
- Commits
  - Way more of the work happened before ASWF, but removing pre-history, downwards trend in volume, but picked up in 2023
- Commits: TSC Members
  - Haven’t formally identified roles within the project
  - Kimball is the architect, drives the advance of the project, everyone else as the “sous chefs”. My involvement is administrative and infrastructure of the project
- Roadmap 2023
  - ABI Compatibility: C level base types: minimal progress
  - Core/Multithreading in the C++ API: WIP
  - Overhaul web site: done
- 2023 Improvements / New Functionality
  - Bug/security/build fixes
  - Documentation/website improvements
  - Groundwork: compression via libdeflate
  - OpenSSF badge: silver 96%, Gold 74% (outstanding Silver badges items are the ones we’re thinking of deprecating)
  - pip install openexr : took over maintenance of OpenEXR Python bindings
- OpenSSF badge progress
- Security
  - Policy statement, CVE reporting
  - OSS-fuzz
  - Signed releases / verified tags
    - Get the green verified tag on release keys when you set up GPG keys
  - Snyk scan
  - OpenSSF Scorecard
  - Would like to set up a meeting as to what OpenEXR has done for security. Some of the work would be easy for other projects to pick up, I can guide others easily through these.
- Documentation Improvements
  - New-ish website (sphinx, readthedocs)
    - Now builds on Windows/macOS
  - Standard Attributes
  - Scene-linear
- Coming soon
  - Compression via zstd (in time for VFX Platform 2025)
  - C++ interface to OpenEXRCore
  - Rewrite OpenEXR Python bindings in pybind11
  - Finish Imath port to pybind11
  - Lucas Miller contributed seed of porting Imath to pybind11 during DevDays
  - Kimball:
    - Will be changing API / ABI, so make it a 4.0 release
    - Maybe enough legacy compatibility to keep it a 3.x release, still under debate
    - Looking at one other compression method, more GPU friendly
  - Daniel: was pleased to see the project has taken over responsibility for PyPI distribution of OpenEXR. There was a weird situation where it has fallen into disrepair, had been done by someone outside the project. This is much better. Pillow is very accessible on PyPI, so that’s often what people start with. Having OpenEXR available on PyPI is great.
  - Cary: this is always below our radar, the problem was that it was out there and people were using it. Our party line was “if you want Python bindings, use OpenImageIO”. But that exhibits a mindset of working at a large studio with a large engineering staff, building behind the firewall with large infrastructure. But for a lot of people, if you can’t pip install, it doesn’t exist. We’ve come to that rather late, but it’s a philosophy we need to embrace. PyPI setup for OpenImageIO may be complete yet (?), at least there’s a start on it. For revamped Python bindings, I see something very basic / barebones, nothing tricky, but will be useful, and it’s what people will get when they do the natural thing of “pip install openexr”
- Project Weaknesses / Needs
  - Windows support
  - Hardware-we-don’t-have support
  - Widening the contributor community
    - Some contributions on Dev Days, hasn’t panned out into longer term support, except one developer at ILM
  - Transition planning
- OpenEXR voted unanimously to be continued for one more year
- Jonathan (Chat): Great presentation, Cary, and we’d love to learn more about the OpenEXR team’s approach to fuzz testing. Chris: Great presentation Cary. Do you have a specific list of needs on the windows side? LarrY: Another OpenEXR roadmap item I don’t think was mentioned is GPU decompression and/or direct loading. NVIDIA and Epic have both discussed lending a hand there as well. Cary: Mostly just random support issues, “X fails on Windows”, often CMake related. Chris: cmake issues are definitely a pain to track down … there’s so much variability in how it can be used.
Rez Annual Review - Stephen
- 2024 rez annual project review
- Project Info
  - Brief Description: a lightweight cross-platform package manager written in Python. Build and release packages to a central repository, then consume them in standalone configured environments
  - Wiki replaced by ReadTheDocs at rez.readthedocs.io
  - Google Group replaced by LF mailing list
  - Allan left project as project chair last year and TSC, JC and I are joint chairpersons for the current cycle
- Project Origins
  - V1 implementation at Dr.D Studios circa 2011
  - V2 implementation at Method Studios, LA, circa 2014
    - Animal Logic one of the first studios to adopt outside Method
- Incubation Report Card
  - Significant progress
    - License Scan
      - Removed venv module
    - Contributing
    - Code of Conduct
    - Release
    - Support
    - Adopters
    - OpenSSF Badge
    - Still some docs and OpenSSF to shape up
- Historical rez commits
  - Growth in 2023 from 2022
- Historical rez commits after Allan
  - No Allan commits in 2023, yet commits are up.
  - Wide variety of contributors
  - 11 PRs merged in last month, seeing progress, community traction
  - LF Stats had us up 20% contributors, 92% PRs
- Recent Releases Timeline
  - 2.111.3 -> Last Allan-only release 2022/08
  - 2.112.0 -> First ASWF Release 2022/11
  - 2.113.0 -> misc items 2023/09
  - 2.114.0 -> drop support for Python 2 installs 2023/11
  - 2.114.1 -> Deprecation / Migration helper release 2023/12
    - Shepherded by JC, dropping Python 2 in stages, and provide migration platform, deprecation notices, so 3.0 could formally drop Python 2
  - 3.0.0 -> officially drop support for Python 2 2024/02
    - Cannot install or use Rez with Python 2 anymore
  - 3.1.0 -> Misc features / fixes, Docs, py2-removals 2024/03
  - 3.1.1 -> bugfix for issue in 3.1.0 and docs 2024/04
- Recent Developments
  - Dropped Python 2 support
  - Migrated past numerous deprecations in 3.0.0
  - Completely re-tooled docs from Github Wiki to readthedocs
    - Pivot to documentation, since was a major hurdle to adoption / contribution
  - Many piecemeal docs updates since then
  - CLOtributor & Security Researchers
    - Lots of value for ASWF projects in CLOtributor, effort in writing up and tagging issues, and seeing results from that. We even had security researchers from NYU reach out, and are now engaged and working with us to improve our static analysis, and help with threat modeling, and evaluate future threat modeling. In the future Rez would like to look at cloud repositories, which will require our security to be dialed in. Early discussions, but had great meeting.
  - Update to Package Orderers
  - Numerous bug fixes, Python 2 removals, and consistency updates
  - Discussions around the creation of a config-oriented sub-group
  - OpenSSF Badge Progress
    - 91% towards passing
    - 71% towards silver
    - 52% towards gold
    - Hopefully not far away from getting a badge
- Community Engagement
  - Rez Slack community is a bastion of people troubleshooting, sharing. Everyone has different or shared problems. The Rez Slack community is active, posting questions and helping each other. That’s another metric we can use to show the activity of the community.
- Top Requested Features (Still)
  - Better Docs
  - “Provides”
  - Better Windows shell support: 95% of work is done in PR, but some challenging remaining issues. Some key contributors have left the companies they were working for.
  - Better rez-pip
    - Can start testing with
    - In a different GitHub repo
  - Cloud package repositories
  - Caching-oriented features and fixes
  - Robust starter rez recipe set
- Project Challenge Progress
  - Difficulties blocking contribution
    - Documentation (ongoing improvement!)
    - Niche domain
    - Testing / debugging / logging
  - User support -> now high Slack activity
  - Top project requests
  - Dependence on Allan -> project continues
  - Attracting long-term contributors
  - Still early days of our ASWF process
  - Very little company support
  - Lull in activity -> some high quality releases
- New or unmentioned challenges
  - Down a TSC member
  - JC has been largely carrying the team
    - But number of contributors has increased a lot
  - Incomplete / dated knowledge of who and how many use Rez
- Things REz needs
  - A new TSC member
    - Have worked in a facility that used or uses rez
    - Have a notion of the profile of rez as a project and of rez ecosystem
    - Primarily contribute in the form of:
      - GitHub maintainer ship…
  - Further contributions to improve docs
  - People to test and finish the Windows Shell Pathing PR
  - Contributions towards our other high-important items
  - Forking Rez
- Config-oriented Working Subgroup
  - Goal: centralize discussions around the concept of VFX-studio-centric so-called “Configuration Systems”, away from rez itself
    - Many rez-using studios invest in their own systems for configuration for various purposes:
      - How to configure what rez requests to make
      - How to configure production differently
      - How to configure non-package information (FPS, resolution, OCIO configs, app license servers, aspect ratio…)
      - Expressing production hierarchies and schemas
  - Hypothetical namings proposed (WIP):
    - wg-config / wg-rez-config / wg-rez-prodconfig / wg-rez-envconfig / etc
- Seeking Organization Info
  - Spreadsheet with studios using Rez
  - Information we’re very invested in getting from studios using Rez:
    - Do you currently maintain your own fork of rez?
    - For what reason are you continuing to maintain a fork?
    - What features does rez need for you to un-fork?
- Questions?
  - John: when we had a checkin, we’ve talked about a lot of downstream forks, are there ways this can be upstreamed? Stephen: we haven’t looked at it too much, we’re still in knowledge seeking phase. A lot of rez using studios are often the smaller ones, they may not be showing up to ASWF meetings, or participating in Slack channel. We may be lacking ways to reach out to users directly. Would be good if TAC or TAC adjacent members who know someone using rez, please let them know we want to talk to them.
- Motion to renew? John
  - Kimball makes motion, Larry seconds
  - All yeah, no oppose / abstain
  - Rez is renewed for a year
  - John: we’re trying to get better about doing these motions
  - Stephen: if we can keep up this momentum, we may push for adoption in the coming year before next review
Dev Days 2024 - Carol
- We have dates, Sept 25-26, locked in, helps people plan in advance.
- We’re looking for general “intent to participate” from projects - there will be a more formal process soon, but if you could reply here, or let myself or Larry know if your project/company wants to participate this year, would be amazing!
- If your project or company has a “pretty good idea” you would like to participate, we would like to know so we can start working on website, press releases. Let me and Larry know. Larry: every project that participated was enthusiastic, encourage other projects to participate.
  - Jonathan (chat): count MaterialX in
  - Kimball: my company will participate, and OpenEXR as well
  - Larry (chat): SPI is in, and so is OpenImageIO. Want to say yes for OSL, but not sure we can come up with one day tasks
  - Carol: we’ll have a more formal participation process, will be coming next.
  - Cary: a few obstacles last year, but wasn’t that hard. ILM is in again
Open Source Days 2024 - Emily
- Call for speakers is open, please submit
  - Use cases, best practices
  - If you have heard someone give an interesting talk or heard an interesting topic, reach out to me
  - Also looking for program committee to review CFP submissions, a 2 hour commitment. Would like to have a few more folks to contribute from TAC to make sure we have relevant content.
- Ben Giles (chat): I had some fairly positive responses internally on my attending SIGGRAPH or related to discuss our 10-bit colour Wayland compositor and my trials and tribulations. I love that people here may be interested! Are there other events or people I should be highlighting? Happy to discuss offline as well. 4:4:4 chroma subsampling also related… Emily: You should submit to speak at ASWF Open Source Days during SIGGRAPH. Ben: Thanks Emily, will do. It’s been very encouraged getting positive feedback from ASWF folks. ASWF community ROCKS! We have access to some artists and TDs that can help with a demo. Is there anything in particular people would like to see working in our compositor? Whether that’s a particular ASWF project, pipeline, or tool? I’ll note we currently use Blender and a lot of open source kit because Wayland is not part of the VFX Ref Platform. Would love to get more tools onto Wayland like Houdini, Maya, Resolve, Nuke, etc… John Mertic (Linux Foundation) I’d love to chat about getting Wayland into VFX Ref Platform (I think we spoke about Workstation Experience WG or similar?). Carol: Working with OpenReviewInitiative comes to mind. We’d love to come, if we (startup vendor), are welcome. We work with OSS projects, particularly around Wayland and the graphics stack generally.