OpenSource-Dev

Open Source Portal

OSDev@lists.secondlife.com - mailing list for discussing open source development issues related to Second Life. This is a high-traffic mailing list (as many as 30-40 messages/day on a busy day).

IMPORTANT: Please be sure to read the Posting Policies and Guidelines below before posting to this mailing list.

Posting Policies and Guidelines

The os-dev mailing list is for development issue related to Second Life open source code. The following policies are meant to ensure we can keep conversation civil and on-topic. "Policies" are rules that need to be followed to ensure continued posting privileges. "Guidelines" have more wiggle room, but should be considered before posting.

Policies

This mailing list is for discussing problems and ideas that software developers can directly address and for collaboration on solutions and improvements, not for turning Linden Lab development staff into proxies to reach other parts of Linden Lab (e.g. legal, executive, human resources, etc).
Please adhere to the guidelines for blog.secondlife.com. Since we can't delete comments that are in violation, we're going to instead preemptively set the "moderated" bit for repeat violators.
Constructive criticism is welcome, but general complaints which only serve to discourage use of Second Life or discourage cooperation with Linden Lab should be taken elsewhere.
If you have auto-reply email software (such as out-of-office notification), please make sure that it's configured correctly. Failure to do so will cause you to receive moderated access until you assure us it's fixed. See the Autoreply Software section below for more details.
If someone else is violating mailing list policy, do not reply to them on the list. Reply to them offlist if you feel you need to engage them. If you feel disciplinary action is required, send mail to the list administrator (<os-dev-owner@lists.secondlife.com>). Engaging with them on-list may result in the moderation bit being set on your account.

Guidelines

In addition to the policies above, here's some guidelines. These aren't hard-and-fast rules, but rather, good etiquette. There are a lot of people on this list (800+ as of this writing), so please follow these guidelines when you post:

Please remember the old mantra "praise in public, criticize in private". On-list reprimands are rarely of interest to the general mailing list.
If you are asking a question to the list, either browse the archives or do a keyword search of the archives first to check if your question has already been responded.
Keep threads on topic. If you want to talk about something unrelated to the subject of a thread, change the subject line. If the new topic is something that doesn't belong on os-dev@, please strongly consider posting it elsewhere.
If a topic generates more than five replies in less than 24 hours, it's time to redirect that conversation to one of our other tools, either the wiki, the bug tracker, or a thread in the appropriate forum.
If the topic is not specifically a Second Life development-related topic (e.g. mailing list policy or a licensing discussion), it should be redirected to the wiki, the bug tracker, or the appropriate forum immediately. One post per 48 hours should be sufficient to bring it to everyone's attention.
If after 48 hours, the topic seems to have died out on the alternate forum, it's ok to reraise the issue on this mailing list, summarizing the offlist conversation thus far, and calling for further comment in the alternate forum.
Please use the keywords below (in the "Subject Line Keywords" section) when posting, especially the "strongly recommended" keywords.
Most LSL scripting issues are better addressed on the secondlifescripters mailing list.

These guidelines try to balance between making sure that people have a large forum to raise and discuss a broad spectrum of issues, while at the same time ensuring that the list doesn't become overwhelmed with discussion on a single topic that may not be of interest to everyone on the list.

Subject Line Keywords

When posting to the list, please take your best guess at the right subject line keyword to put on your email. Some of the keywords below are strongly recommended, while some are purely optional. However, all of them will help people organize

Strongly recommended (since they are arguably a little off-topic):

[POLICY] issues about policy and etiquette on wiki, jira, and the mailing list, some licensing/legal logistics issues NOTE: licensing issues should be directed to licensing@lindenlab.com
[META] repositories, creating inworld meeting places, getting and keeping the community organized, product cycle processes
[WEB] questions/complaints about the website, jira, wiki, etc

Optional:

[ANN] announcements
[VWR] questions about viewer releases. Analogous to the "VWR" project on jira.secondlife.com
[SVC] questions about the Second Life service (simulators, login servers, web apis, general grid questions). Analogous to the "SVC" project on jira.secondlife.com
[IDEA] for new features ideas and proposals
[VOICE] about voice activation features
[HELP] for topic about building the viewer or other support request
[I18N] for internationalization and localization problems
[EVENTLET] eventlet questions
[MULIB] mulib questions
[PATCH] for patchy patches! For feedback on a patch, or just to let people know it exists so they can try it.
[AWG] Architecture Working Group

If you have suggested changes for these keywords, please put your suggestion on the talk page.

Autoreply Software

If you have autoreply software to notify people that you are out of the office, please make sure that the software complies with the "Personal Responder" guidelines defined in RFC 3834 - Recommendations for Automatic Responses to Electronic Mail. In particular:

Personal and Group responses whose purpose is to notify the sender of a message of a temporary absence of the recipient (e.g., "vacation" and "out of the office" notices) SHOULD NOT be issued unless a valid address for the recipient is explicitly included in a recipient (e.g., To, Cc, Bcc, Resent-To, Resent-Cc, or Resent-Bcc) field of the subject message. Since a recipient may have multiple addresses forwarded to the same mailbox, recipient SHOULD be able to specify a set of addresses to the responder which it will recognize as valid for that recipient.

If your autoreply software sends mail to the os-dev mailing list, you will be marked as a moderated member of the mailing list, meaning that all messages you send to the mailing list will need to be approved by a list moderator. You may request to be switched to an unmoderated member only after you can assure the list moderators that your autoreply software has been upgraded to comply with RFC 3834.

Second Life <-> mailing list name mapping

Editing on this wiki is done using Second Life names, but posting on the mailing list is often done using another name (real name or non-Second Life alias). We don't ask anyone to reveal any information they don't want to, but we do encourage those who don't use their Second Life names on the mailing list to put their name in the SLDev Resident Names table.

SLDev Traffic

Old copies of SLDev Traffic, a weekly summary of this mailing list, are still available, but are no longer being written. Volunteers to help revive this useful service would be greatly appreciated.

Related mailing lists

sldev-commits

This is for automated notices of activity on svn.secondlife.com. See https://lists.secondlife.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sldev-commits for more information