SLDev-Traffic 20

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sldev-traffic no 20

sldev discussions through July 15, 2007

Bugs or Improvements Suitable for Open Source Programmers

Nicholaz Beresford created issue VWR-1577, a meta issue listing a great many bugs that could be tackled by open source developers. If you're interested in getting your feet wet in the viewer, but need a project idea, look no further!

Crash on Some AMD Chips

A bug went out in 1.17.3 which caused the Windows viewer to crash on startup with some AMD CPUs, owing to VWR-1610. sldev listmembers climbed all over the bug in a very active thread, helping to identify and push possible solutions for the problem. And that's why we love you. :)

Should Sculpted Prim Textures Be Uncompressed?

Dale Glass suggested that sculpted prim textures, or 64x64 and smaller textures in general, could remain uncompressed. This would provide an incentive to use smaller textures, and would solve the artifacting problems that drive sculpted prim makers to try using unnecessarily large textures. There hasn't been a viewer patch for this to date, but it should be possible to at least crank the jpeg compression level on small textures.

Helping to prove the uncompressed/reduced compression image concept, John Hurliman created a couple libsecondlife-based utilities at Importprimscript and SLImageUpload. Linden Lab can't speak to the safety of code from external sources, but peer code reviews are entirely appropriate on the mailing list.

Redistributing the Second Life Viewer

Dale Glass, in working toward producing an independent viewer distribution, created a Redistribution page, which Rob Linden has consolidated with the Third Party Library page. As with the above, this is also a good place to look if you want to help tackle proprietary dependencies, a common desire among open source developers.

Dale's current approach is to make a meta installer, which collects files from an official installation, and retrieves all available and freely-distributable files needed to complete the installation from his own site automatically. Currently the installer is working for Windows, and the source is at http://svn.daleglass.net/sl/branches/buildfixes_1-18-0/indra/newview/installers/windows-dale/ - as always, proceed with care!

Reliable Message Delivery Over HTTP

Phoenix Linden posted a link to Reliable Message Delivery Over HTTP. Linden Lab are planning to open source their Certified HTTP implementation, and here you can read about that, and the efforts on reliable back-end communication.

As a reminder, if there are other portions of the servers which should be open sourced in advance of the entire network of servers, the list is a great place to ask.

"Bogus" Triage

Laurent Laborde sparked an effort at finding bugs which could be trivially rejected. As an increasing number of residents dive in headfirst, filing first bugs before learning to search for existing issues or send appropriate items to support, more of this will be necessary. Matthew Shepherd and Gigs Taggart pitched in, and altogether a great number of issues were resolved. (Thanks!)

JIRA and SLDev Fanclub

Laurent Laborde was impressed by much of JIRA, and ended up creating an in-world group called the "JIRA and SLDev Fanclub." Laurent was originally going to name the list something which might have made it difficult for Lindens to join, but this one's safe.

If you're keen to catch other sldevers in-world outside of Linden office hours, this could be a good way of doing so.

Mute Visbility Progress

Able Whitman continues development on visibility muting, as described in VWR-1017. Able has posted patches to the mailing list, as well as a built viewer. The patch is at http://ablewhitman.org/viewer/aw-41571.patch.zip

Open Source Candidate Repository

Dzonatas Sol is posting builds of the viewer with various open source patches applied. This could be a good way of testing patches for developers who aren't able or willing to collect patches and create their own builds. Dzonatas invites direct mail (or presumably in-world contact?) from parties wishing to work with her.

Updated Doxygen Docs

If you're not using Dale Glass' generated Doxygen docs... you should be!

Updated this week: http://doc.daleglass.net/index.html

JIRA Pain - Less Slowness - Wiki, More

The JIRA is running much faster than before, although there's still room for improvement.

The wiki still needs love. You can follow developments at WEB-223.

The Hippos

Last but certainly not least - The Hippos! Normally threads get to settle into inactivity for a couple days before being summarized, but this seemed relevant and certainly of interest to many sldev-traffic readers. Head on over for a read, and consider nominating someone you respect. :)

Thanks for readin'!