[dpdk-dev] Minutes of Technical Board Meeting, 2021-05-19

[dpdk-dev] Minutes of Technical Board Meeting, 2021-05-19

[Olivier Matz]

Minutes of Technical Board Meeting, 2021-05-19
==============================================

Members Attending
-----------------

- Aaron
- Bruce
- Ferruh
- Hemant
- Honnappa
- Jerin
- Kevin
- Konstantin
- Maxime
- Olivier (chair)
- Thomas

NOTE: The technical board meetings every second Wednesday at
https://meet.jit.si/DPDK at 3 pm UTC.
Meetings are public, and DPDK community members are welcome to attend.

NOTE: Next meeting will be on Wednesday 2021-06-02 @3pm UTC, and will be
chaired by Stephen.

1/ Tech Board Membership Policy
-------------------------------

Governing board wants the techboard to better document the current
policy for membership.

Hemant started to write a document about the current policy. We will
continue the discussion based on it.

2/ Crypto maintainership
------------------------

There is no backup maintainer for the crypto tree for Akhil since he
took the leading role. Requesting companies involved in crypto to
nominate someone.

Action on Ferruh to internally check if someone can take the role at
Intel.

3/ Use of Travis CI
-------------------

Currently, Travis CI is used for Arm tests. It is triggered by the CI
bot, but we regularly run out of credits.

Honnappa and Aaron are already discussing with Travis to be unblocked.

Arm is also working on a their own CI infrastructure (no ETA yet).

4/ Enhancing build system's developer mode
------------------------------------------

Discussion about adding more checks to the developer mode of the
build system (like code/doc consistency).
See https://git.dpdk.org/dpdk/commit/?id=bc4617433845

Independent scripts can already be added to the tree, like this one:
http://git.dpdk.org/dpdk/commit/devtools?id=947dff12bc

If these scripts are added to the developer mode build, they should only
be called when necessary (i.e. when files impacting the result are
modified). That way, the build stays fast when there is nothing to do.

The alternative is to add these checks to a checkpatch script (to be run
before patch submission instead of build).

5/ Feature announcement
-----------------------

We encourage companies and developers involved in DPDK to announce
their roadmap for next versions. It gives visibility to users, avoids
people to blindly work on the same features, helps to plan how much time
is needed for integration and review, and to check that nothing is
forgotten.

The techboard decided that patches for features announced earlier in the
roadmap have a priority bonus for integration, all other things being
equal (patch quality, submission date, ...)

Action on Thomas to integrate this in the documentation.

6/ ABI stability period
-----------------------

At next meeting, we would like to discuss the extension of the ABI
stability period. The meeting could be dedicated to this discussion.

7/ Examples to remove
---------------------

AR for everyone: check if examples should be removed (one was mentionned
during the meeting: examples/performance-thread).