Minutes of technical board meeting 2018-02-14

Minutes of technical board meeting 2018-02-14

[Olivier Matz]

Hi,

Here are the minutes of the last DPDK technical board meeting held on
2018-02-14.

Attendees: 6 members among 9 were present, which is less than the quorum
(70% of the Technical Board):
- Ferruh Yigit
- Jerin Jacob
- Konstantin Ananyev
- Olivier Matz
- Stephen Hemminger
- Thomas Monjalon


1) Acknowledge Yuanhan Liu resignation from vhost/virtio maintenance and
   replacement by Maxime Coquelin

   First the techboard would like to thanks Yuanhan for his great job on
   vhost and virtio.

   The new virtio tree maintainer Maxime has been approved by the
   techboard (quorum reached by mail for this point). We are confident
   that Maxime is the right person.

2) Review remaining deprecation notices for 18.02

   The only one that remaining was the deprecation notice for kernel
   version: https://dpdk.org/dev/patchwork/patch/34778/

   There is no consensus yet about which kernel versions should be
   supported. The latest upstream LTS kernel is 3.16, but some
   distributions maintain kernels based on older ones.

   It has been decided to drop this patch for 18.02, and take the
   decision for 18.05. The discussion continues on the mailing list.

3) Contribution guideline for dependent work
   https://dpdk.org/dev/patchwork/patch/33250/

   As explained in the patch description, the contributions with
   dependent work require a special attention. Enforcing the dependent
   work:
   - reduces maintenance
   - keeps the code consistent
   But:
   - can prevent contribution, because there is too much work
   - it not always possible because requiring special knowledge

   For large contributions, the techboard shall provide guidelines on a
   case by case basis.

   To enforce the changes:
   - at the beginning of the release cycle, the objectives are highlighted
     (ex: all libraries should use the new xxx api instead of yyy). This
     can be repeated in RC1 announcement.
   - after 2 or 3 releases, the PMDs or libraries that do not follow the
     recommendations are disabled.


Next Meeting:
- 2018-02-28 @ 3pm UTC
- Stephen to chair discussion as per alphabetical order
- Rediscuss 3) with quorum