Minutes from OpenVDB TSC meeting, Octtober 8th, 2024

Attendees: *Ken* M., *Nick* A., *Jeff* L., *Andre* P, *Dan* B., *Greg* H.

Regrets: *Rich* J.

Additional Attendees:
John Mertic (Linux Foundation), Dhruv Govil (Apple), Mathew Cong (NVIDIA),
Jonathan Swartz (NVIDIA), JT Nelson (Blender), Victor Lu

Agenda:

1) Confirm quorum
2) Secretary
3) Re-licensing Progress
4) CI
5) Changing cpp test to gtest in AX
6) Deprecation Policy
7) PR-1916 - Nanobind PR
8) ABI and API Changes
9) Tube complex and thicken mesh
10) Next meeting

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1) Confirm quorum

Quorum is present.

2) Secretary

Secretary is  Andre Pradhana.

3) Re-licensing Progress

NVIDIA has signed the CLA, but has not added their name to the list. ILM and
United Therapeutics have signed.

The next step is to merge PR-1858 (which needs a second approval). Noted that
the PR probably needs to be updated to be more aligned with the master branch.
There was a suggestion to change the target of the PR to a feature branch to
bring everything up to date before merging to master.

4) CI

There are a few CI issues, e.g. with Houdini 20.5 and AX unit tests failing due
to LLVM version issues.

5) Changing cpp test to gtest in AX

Tim is looking at changing cpp test to unit test in
[PR-1919](https://github.com/AcademySoftwareFoundation/openvdb/pull/1919).

6) Deprecation Policy

Currently, we do not change the ABI until after the major release, i.e. we used
to add an extra minor release.

We took a vote (six people agreed, one abstains) and agreed to drop ABI support
at the same time as a major release. Our deprecation policy is to support the
current and last two versions of the VFX reference platform.

7) PR-1916 - Nanobind PR

This PR is to switch from pybind11 to NanoBind. Andre agreed to take a look at
the PR.

8) ABI and API Changes

Dan went through a few suggestions:
 - Root Node and Internal Nodes API changes: adding public methods to check if a
 key exists in map and adding index-based iteration on internal nodes.
 - Adding unsafe methods to bypass checks. It was suggested to add new methods
 without unsafe labels.

9) Tube complex and thicken mesh

Greg will have a PR ready for creating tube complexes and thicken mesh.

10) Next meeting

Next meeting is on October 22nd, 2024. 2pm-3pm EDT (GMT-4).