[dpdk-dev] Minutes of Technical Board Meeting, 2019-09-25

[Bruce Richardson <bruce.richardson@intel.com>]

Members Attending
-----------------
Bruce (chair)
Ferruh
Hemant
Jerin
Konstantin
Maxime
Stephen
Thomas

NOTE: The technical board meetings every second Wednesday on IRC channel
  #dpdk-board, at 3pm UTC. Meetings are public and DPDK community members
  are welcome to attend.

NOTE: Next meeting will be on Wednesday 2019-10-09 @3pm UTC, and will be
  chaired by Ferruh.

Summary of meeting:
-------------------

1. Removal of examples (standing agenda item): 

	Bruce reported that he is working on this, with a patchset in
	progress for submission upstream shortly


2. SPDX licenses (standing agenda item):

	Hemant provided an update on the gaps to be closed for achieving
	use of SPDX tags alone (i.e. no license text in files) in 19.11.
	Key gaps:

	* Issue identified with pmdinfogen using GPL derived code, meaning
	  it needs a license exception. Tech board has approved the
	  exception and the request will now be passed to the governing
	  board for final approval. Thereafter an update will be made to
	  the file "license/exceptions.txt" in the DPDK repo

	* Two drivers and various miscelaneous files are missing license
	  header updates. Hemant and Stephen will work together to produce
	  complete list of files needing update and will ping the
	  maintainers of the drivers in question to see if they can get a
	  mass update from them.


3. ABI Policy Discussion Following Userspace:

	Ray Kinsella has provided an update via email on the output of the
	discussions at userspace. Discussion followed on how ABI breaks are
	to be managed, including use of staging trees, as well as
	discussion on the releases for which the ABI policy will be
	new complied with. Also discussed was allowable changes for 19.11
	in advance of the policy coming into effect. At the end of the
	discussion a number of key proposals were agreed upon:

	1. New DPDK ABI policy sent and discussed previously is approved
	   for use in a future DPDK release. [1]
	2. DPDK 19.11 release will remain targetted at 19.11 and will not
	   be postponed to a 19.12 release because of ABI changes.
	3. The new ABI policy will take effect from 19.11 release, meaning
	   that DPDK 20.02 and 20.05 releases must be ABI compatible with
	   the 19.11 release.

	The decision to introduce policy from 19.11 may be reviewed at a
	future techboard meeting in advance of the 19.11 release, if
	maintainers/contributors identify a serious issue that requires
	additional changes to the existing ABI ahead of stabilization, and
	which cannot be done in the 19.11 timeframe.

	** It is therefore STRONGLY RECOMMENDED by the technical board,
	that all maintainers, committers and contributors, assess the
	impact of the new ABI policy on their planned work for next year,
	and flag any major issues to the technical board ahead of the 19.11
	release.**


4. Technical board composition.

	Discussion of adding new members to the technical board was not
	possible at the meeting due to time constraints. This will be
	discussed by the board over email, and any updates to the technical
	board membership will be sent out to the community via email once
	the discussion has concluded.

[1] http://patches.dpdk.org/project/dpdk/list/?series=6524