Board,

The TSC met on 12.12.2013. As might be expected (again), the bulk of the
meeting was concerned with the delay in the Hydrogen release schedule.
The summary is as follows: as you know, the delay we are experiencing
with the Hydrogen release is due to delays in finishing the Openflow
1.3 plugin and associated adapters. The team is now targeting
12.20.2013 as the date when the code will be ready for testing and
integration. This date raises several important issues. The first is
that the ODP Summit is on 02.04.2014 - 02.05.2014. Since System
Testing and Integration will require on the order of three weeks, this
puts a bound on when we can release Hydrogen; essentially the last day
we could possibly release Hydrogen would be 02.03.2014. The second is
that the next two weeks are the Christmas and New Years holiday weeks
and as such many people will be on vacation. This means that the next
time we can look at the state of the OF 1.3 plugin, associated
adapters and system test and integration is 01.06.2014 (the TSC will
be using the Technical Work Stream slot that day to review status).
Doing the arithmetic, this means that we would have only three weeks
in which to do system testing, integration, and any other
housekeeping/bug fixing before the summit (again with the last
possible day to release Hydrogen being 02.03.2014).

Given the time constraints outlined above, several community members
expressed concern that even in the best case scenario three weeks is
not enough time for the OpenFlow 1.3 plugin code path to be exercised
in the wild (get the associated testing, etc) to declare that it is
production ready. There is also an issue surrounding the existence and
functioning of adapters between the AD-SAL and MD-SAL (the OF 1.0
plugin uses the AD-SAL whereas the OF 1.3 plugin, as well as many of
the projects in the other editions, use the MD-SAL). Several proposals
were floated to address this problem, including releasing Hydrogen
with two OpenFlow plugins, OF 1.0 and an "experimental" OF 1.3 plugin.
In this case we will also need configuration that would enable one or
there other (again with associated adapters); all of this will of
course require System Test and Integration time. We plan to have a
decision on this after the 01.06.20.14 meeting.

As always, please let me know if you have questions and/or comments.

Thanks,

--dmm