On Tue, 18 Dec 2012 05:53:02 +0100, Latif Khalifa wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 17, 2012 at 10:18 PM, Oz Linden (Scott Lawrence)
>
> People who don't fancy themselves to be the infallible gods of system
> design often find it beneficial to hear the feedback, especially in
> opensource projects. It might even lead to (gasp) more reliable system
> and better customer satisfaction.
In fact, it was not just feedback: there has been a "feedforward"
from me, months ago (see the quoted emails below, exchanged with Oz
back in July).
> Whenever I relapse into using my time to help improve Linden Lab's
> products by doing testing, filing bug reports and repro cases, Oz
> Linden's attitude quickly convinces me that it's not worth it.
>
> (This email started as my feedback about some timing issue with
> network messages that could potentially cause bake fails, but then I
> saw all-knowing Oz dismiss any need for it)
I'd rather not judge "Oz, the man" because it is hard to tell whether
his actions are the only result of his own decisions and doings, or
are the materialization of LL's policy towards OpenSource and, if we
can judge from the resulting actions their policy would clearly be:
"take benefit of all the advantages OpenSource can bring to us (i.e.
free coding and debugging horsepower provided by volunteering
developers), and dismiss all the duties OpenSource cooperation
involves in return (such as providing clean diffs for changed we
made behind closed doors(*) before releasing them, but also providing
an *open* list of known bugs to developers)".
As far as I am concerned, while I am very sorry for the poor
implementation choice (and while I saw it coming and tried my best
to offer a smarter and yet easy alternative), I can live with it (in
35+ years of programming I've seen so many poor implementation
choices that I long lost the count and learned to make with them).
No, what bothers me most (and what I *can* and *do* judge) is that LL
(or Oz, or both), do(es)n't seem to (want to) understand what
OpenSource entails (as benefits, rights, but also *duties* !)...
Henri.
(*) This is one of the worst problems with LL's viewer development:
they modify stuff for months behind closed doors instead of doing
it in the open... That's *NOT* the OpenSource way of doing
things !!!
And here is the "feedforward" stuff:
---
Date: Tue, 17 Jul 2012 00:12:26 +0200
From: Henri Beauchamp
To: "Oz Linden (Scott Lawrence)"
Subject: Upcoming changes to the baking system and "current outfit" folder
Greetings,
Although I'm not invited to the TPV meetings (not that it would change
many things anyway, since those are performed on voice and I won't
understand half of what is said as a result), I was made aware that
you (LL) are planing to *impose* the use of the "current outfit" folder
to implement the future baking system...
I personally got many grudges against this "current outfit" folder
and the way the v2/3 viewers auto-create and auto-delete assets (be
them links for the COF or, for example, auto-re-creating calling
cards to mirror the friends list on login):
- It is totally useless from the user's point of view (especially
with viewers that provide a proper "Worn Items" tab, with full
folder/items list of worn items, like Snowglobe did) and it
therefore clobbers the inventory for nothing.
- It is incompatible with OpenSim grids which don't support
inventory links.
- It can cause inventory losses in case of asset server and/or sim
server issues; typical case: either the asset server got issues or
you just logged in/entered in a new RC channel sim, and you change
your outfit: the viewer messes up with the COF, deleting and creating
assets in it and bang ! your inventory gets corrupted (this is in
no way an hypothetical issue: it happened to me once while testing
viewer 3 on a RC channel on the main grid, to see if inventory
updates were also failing with LL's viewer on this particular RC
(which was indeed the case), and I lost my whole #RLV folder, a
folder that the "support" team was unable (unwilling ?) to recover
(they apparently have no backup or refuse to use them !!!).
When things go wrong with asset and/or sim servers, users are told
not to mess up with their inventory, but with viewer 2/3, the simple
fact of changing an outfit *does* cause automatic items creations/
deletions (and most users will be unaware of that)... This is BAD !
Because of the above issues, the Cool VL Viewer doesn't make use of
the current outfit folder (you may even delete that folder altogether
to keep your inventory lean and clean). Instead, it uses an XML/LLSD
file in the per-account settings directory (meaning there is one such
file for each avatar on each grid; they're even two for SL avatars: one
for the production grid and one for the beta grid).
The XML/LLSD is basically a list of inventory items UUIDs (one map for
attachments, one map for wea
