October 2, 2008

Attendees: tef, Tom, Elaine, Greg, Eric, Conrad

New Action Items

• Al will look into configurations for test machines and Greg's machine (item 2d)
• Greg will investigate options for OpenGL panel user interface (item 3)

Action Items from previous meetings

• Al will decommission SGI after the next Chimera production release
• Al will install stereo-capable workstation to replace SGI before decommissioning SGIs
• tef will contact Adobe for more information about embedding 3d graphics in PDF documents

Minutes

Agenda was adjusted for Scooter's absence. Only two items were discussed: test lab and OpenGL panel.

1. Review Action Items
   1. Miracube stereo display was tested and works.
2. Discuss test lab, viz room and public cubicle setup
   1. Conrad proposed that we get some test machines in addition to the minimal desktop that we already have. The two axis for the machines are performance (low vs medium) and graphics card type (ATI vs nVidia). The goal is to acquire four configurations that are likely to be used by our target audience. The proposed setup is to acquire four machines (low-end/ATI, low/nVidia, medium/ATI, medium/nVidia) and put them (along with the onboard-graphics test machine) in the Treasure Room (to be renamed to Test Lab). Each machine will be multi-boot, with default OSes of two Linux and two Windows.
   2. The cubicle outside of Greg's office (next to Dan's old cubicle) will be designated the public workstation. Greg's current Windows machine (which has a stereo-capable graphics card) will be used as the public machine. Other hardware that will go into the cubicle are the Miracube display and the Phantom (from the Viz Room). Greg will get a replacement machine capable of dual-booting into Windows and Linux.
   3. The PowerMac Pro will be the primary demo machine in the Viz Room, now that stereo works properly in 10.5.5. With the Phantom moved to the public workstation, the Windows machine should only be used if a visitor requires the Windows platform.
   4. Al will look into configurations for the test machines and Greg's machine.
3. Discuss OpenGL panel behavior
   1. Greg passed out handouts for new panel interface. All check buttons now turn features on or off. Features not available on the current platform are grayed out.
   2. Sentence at the top ("This is a debugging tool. Use at your own risk.") should be replaced with "This is a tool for disabling graphical features that are known to be unreliable on some platforms. Disabling features may negatively impact performance." Sentence below ("Save then restart chimera to complete your changes") should be replaced with "Save and restart Chimera to complete your changes".
   3. Two command line flags --factory-opengl and --minimal-opengl will be added to start Chimera using default and "disable all" settings respectively.
   4. There was discussion on what to do when Chimera starts and discovers that the saved configuration does not match the current environment. Everyone agreed that there should be a warning. Conrad and Greg suggest that the saved configuration be ignored. Tom and tef suggest that the saved configuration be applied. Elaine pointed out that there must be a way to revert to a previous configuration if a new driver turns out not to have fixed suspected bugs. Tom suggested that instead of a warning, make the mismatch notification be a dialog that the user can choose whether to use default or saved configuration. Greg will look into how much code is needed to support reversion to previous configuration and making mismatch notification into a dialog.

Following items were deferred until next meeting.

• Schedule Chimera library course for Winter quarter (Scooter)
• Discuss gnats->trac transition, in particular issue categories (Scooter)
• Continue evaluation of features to remove or improve (All)