User:Oz Linden/Office Hours Archive 2010-08-09

List of Attendees

Transcript

[07:28]	Oz Linden:	hi all
[07:28]	Morgaine Dinova:	Haha, thanks Chantal, Robin
[07:29]	Chantal Harvey:	it s pretty funny
[07:29]	Robin Cornelius:	Hi Oz
[07:29]	Morgaine Dinova:	Hiya Oz
[07:29]	Ardy Lay:	Hi
[07:30]	Morgaine Dinova:	/me goes for a coffee
[07:30]	Chantal Harvey:	goodafternoon ;o)
[07:30]	Chantal Harvey:	good idea, coffee
[07:31]	Morgaine Dinova:	Yuck, re-nuked coffee
[07:31]	Oz Linden:	I trust that everyone had a good weekend
[07:31]	Morgaine Dinova:	Yes thanks Oz, you?
[07:31]	Ardy Lay:	Is it over already?
[07:32]	Oz Linden:	I spent some of mine revising my Office Orb... so if it goes haywire you'll know why :-)
[07:32]	Morgaine Dinova:	Is that the shiny grey sphere?
[07:33]	Oz Linden:	yes
[07:33]	Robin Cornelius:	Oz, have we got a specific topic for today? Aleric has been giving me a hard time and wants me to start of a disucssion
[07:33]	Oz Linden:	I have no specific topic today, so the floor is open
[07:33]	Imaze Rhiano:	Blue shiney sphere for me
[07:34]	Techwolf Lupindo:	/me shudders a bit "Aleric..."
[07:34]	Oz Linden:	(should be blue now, since the meeting timer is running)
[07:34]	Robin Cornelius:	Well the basic theme is snowglobe, and getting patches/our work in to the main viewer
[07:34]	Morgaine Dinova:	/me nods. Kinda grey-blue metallic for me. Nice colour
[07:34]	Oz Linden:	Good topic
[07:34]	Morgaine Dinova:	Great topic
[07:34]	Robin Cornelius:	Aleric is not happy with progress and I have to agree, snowglobe is failing to deliver one of its key goals
[07:34]	Qie Niangao:	(I'm mostly here to see if by chance there's any light shed on the Dzonatas Apocrypha)
[07:35]	Techwolf Lupindo:	Not even out http textrues fixes got upstream....sorta.
[07:35]	Techwolf Lupindo:	s/out/our/
[07:35]	Morgaine Dinova:	lol Qie. You don't have the decryption key? ;-)
[07:35]	Qie Niangao:	it must be in my other pants. :p
[07:35]	Robin Cornelius:	and the other big issue is the code comming from upstream is merged on mass and this is causing massive headaches for all of us on snowglobe and Merov who has done lots and lots of ver hard work porting patches around
[07:35]	Imaze Rhiano:	I think he used hashing algorithm - not encryption algorithm
[07:36]	Oz Linden:	From the list and tracker discussions, it was a bit unclear to me whether or not the texture issues were the same in 2.1, but the general case I certainly agree with
[07:37]	Robin Cornelius:	there are some overlaps, some of the things i applied to 1.5 were on top of the port from 2.1
[07:37]	Morgaine Dinova:	Robin: I think it comes down to the actually status of Snowglobe. A real open source project of its own, or a downstream dependency of LL-main?
[07:37]	Robin Cornelius:	some of the UDP fallback handling could be slightly improved
[07:37]	Oz Linden:	Part of the issue from my POV is that you're all so focused on 1.x
[07:38]	Morgaine Dinova:	Oz: Inevitable, until the V2 UI is revised.
[07:38]	Robin Cornelius:	that is true, but it has taken a long time to get 2.X to a state where we can just go ahead and work on it
[07:38]	Oz Linden:	If there are clean patches against 2.1, then importing them is dramaticly easier
[07:38]	Robin Cornelius:	we have had a lot of problems with auto builds and the merge
[07:39]	Robin Cornelius:	and this has consumed massive amouts of merovs time
[07:39]	Techwolf Lupindo:	I think some are waiting for the move to HG for better tracking, right now, 2.1 is changing so much a patch is literlly outdate with the next merge.
[07:39]	Opensource Obscure:	hey everybody.
[07:39]	Oz Linden:	I'm open to hearing proposals for UI fixes on 2.x, but understand that they must be in a form I can get reviewed internally, which rules out "put back 1.x"
[07:39]	Mojito Sorbet:	Part of the issue is that LL is so focused on V2.1
[07:39]	Morgaine Dinova:	Tech++
[07:40]	Oz Linden:	kinda harsh lighting, Opensource
[07:40]	Robin Cornelius:	but this is not just about the UI
[07:40]	Morgaine Dinova:	Oz: And there's your problem in a nutshell --- dependency on review by Lindens internally, rather than by Snowglobe community.
[07:40]	Opensource Obscure:	oh really? thanks for telling me. it was an experiment with Light Projections.
[07:40]	Oz Linden:	I've been quite clear on that point for months, Mojito: LL will no longer be expending effort on SG 1.x
[07:41]	Latif Khalifa:	/me been fighting with the dreadful "dispite our best efforts... couldn't log you in" ...
[07:41]	Mojito Sorbet:	Oz, how many digits are in the number of engineers working on the LL viewer?
[07:41]	Oz Linden:	much better - thank you
[07:41]	Techwolf Lupindo:	Also, don't forget that 2.x had so many bugs that it demorlized anyone thinking of working on 2.x code base. Now that LL is fixing those 3K of bugs, it a wait till LL fixes there stuff first. Then I/we can work with the code.
[07:41]	Opensource Obscure:	this is a video I made yesterday, where i combined projected lights, shadows, wireframe mode and tweaked glow debug settings http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u02HhiJszT0
[07:41]	Oz Linden:	Mojito... I actually don't know how many devs there are working on the viewer now
[07:42]	Mojito Sorbet:	Closer to 3, or 30?
[07:42]	Robin Cornelius:	yes we were stuck on 2.0 for a while because we were trying to catch up on porting patches, then that left SG behind then a massive merge to 2.1
[07:42]	Oz Linden:	The new organization spreads them around between different units
[07:42]	Morgaine Dinova:	Oz: if LL is expending no more effort on SG 1.x, then unless LL expends effort on making SG2 UI's usable by 1.x standards, this looks like an impasse.
[07:43]	Oz Linden:	Well, we've been making fixes to the 2.x UI (2.1 is a big improvement). There is more to do, of course
[07:43]	Robin Cornelius:	I do think we are lacking a fundimental list of 2.X UI greiveances, many of us are engineers and just saying we like it like that is not a spec, we do need to list individual grips one by one,
[07:43]	Mojito Sorbet:	I would expect, with what Philip said about Open Source a couple weeks ago, that the distinction between SnowGlobe and the other viewer LL works on would vanish.
[07:43]	Techwolf Lupindo:	It has gotten to the point that if anyone want to work on the 2.x code base, they want paid to do that. Its that much of a pain now.
[07:43]	Latif Khalifa:	2.1 is not a big improvement UI wise, it has a ton bug fixes but UI wise just some superficial cosmetic changes
[07:44]	Morgaine Dinova:	Philip was talking to us in Groupies over the weekend, gathering points on what is bad about V2 UI. Dunno if that will have any effect though.
[07:44]	Oz Linden:	I'd be willing to bet that we'll hear from Phillip soon then :-)
[07:44]	Mojito Sorbet:	You gave him JIRA numbers I hope
[07:45]	Opensource Obscure:	sidebar behaviour change apart. that was quite important. strongly requested by users.
[07:45]	Techwolf Lupindo:	Robin, the jira has a huge list. It would take over 10 man hours to list them all....I hope I'me joking, but i'me thinking I'me close to the figure.
[07:45]	Robin Cornelius:	we need a cold emotionalless list of UI issues, its two easy to get upset and emtional over the UI and i believe this is making it difficult for even myself to know where i would start to change things
[07:45]	Oz Linden:	and we did that... still need sidebar tear-off
[07:45]	Robin Cornelius:	Techwolf then thats what needs doing
[07:46]	Morgaine Dinova:	Sidebar is still "one thing at a time" though I believe, heavily modal.
[07:46]	Mojito Sorbet:	You don't need to list them all. Isn't there a page in the JIRA that contains links to all of them?
[07:46]	Qie Niangao:	so Linden viewer product will include tear-off sidebar?
[07:46]	Oz Linden:	As a matter of fact, we're going to be doing a major sweep through all Jira issues starting this week
[07:46]	Robin Cornelius:	well ok you can get a good summary from thge JIRA meta links
[07:47]	Mojito Sorbet:	And no fairsies marking them all "intended behavior" :)
[07:47]	Techwolf Lupindo:	Oz, there is even bugs with that. Huge upoar over closeing of valied but old issues.
[07:47]	Thickbrick Sleaford:	I think a good start for cooperating in 2.0-ish UI is between LL and open source developers is for the LL developers to make public whatever UI design documents they worked from during the 2.0 development. Because it makes no sense without further explanation.
[07:47]	Robin Cornelius:	+1
[07:47]	Latif Khalifa:	Thickbrick++
[07:47]	Oz Linden:	Qie: I personally think that tear-offs from the sidebar are needed. I know some others agree. I don't know if anyone is working on it right this minute
[07:48]	Robin Cornelius:	seeing what the intented plan is would make it easier to make changes
[07:48]	Mojito Sorbet:	It would be interesting to know if the internal redoing of XUI actually makes some of the v1 GUI effects impossible to acheive now
[07:48]	Robin Cornelius:	Tear offs should be fairly painless as most of them are sub pannels anyway so just need rwapping in a floater
[07:48]	Oz Linden:	Hmmm... that's an interesting idea Techwolf. I'll see if I can do that.
[07:48]	Qie Niangao:	Thanks, Oz. As long as tear-off isn't a non-starter in LL, that's good to know.
[07:48]	Morgaine Dinova:	If there were "design documents", that would be useful, Thick. But it's a big "if".
[07:49]	Techwolf Lupindo:	/me points to Thickbrick
[07:49]	Mojito Sorbet:	For example, the management of chat and IM windows.
[07:50]	Latif Khalifa:	I don't think a simple tear off would suffice. Group and people profiles have much detirouted in viewer2 in order to be squeezed in the sidebar. Group management is way too difficult on that size. What we need is the ability to tear off from the side panel put in expended "advanced" mode to be presented with the profiles viewer 1.x style
[07:50]	Oz Linden:	I actually have no idea whether or not there were design docs - by the time I joined, everything was in bug stomping mode
[07:50]	Ardy Lay:	There was a design document provided for ProductEngine to work from. It was a GoogleDoc of some sort and required an account to access.
[07:50]	Techwolf Lupindo:	I think it is safe to say none of us have ever work with design UI docs, so it will be like me, where does one even start on somthing like that?
[07:51]	Oz Linden:	I do know that there is a project spinning up to redo profiles
[07:51]	Imaze Rhiano:	I don't think that returning back to V1 UI is possible after V2 - what it needs to be done is to allow users more power to customize their UI
[07:51]	Robin Cornelius:	yes
[07:51]	Oz Linden:	I don't know details yet
[07:51]	Mojito Sorbet:	Why is it not possible?
[07:51]	Mojito Sorbet:	That was my quation: has the underlying mechanism so changed that it is actually impossible?
[07:51]	Robin Cornelius:	no but its not superfical changes
[07:52]	Robin Cornelius:	it would be more benift making the 2.0 UI flexible
[07:52]	Oz Linden:	It's software... with enough work almost anything is possible :-)
[07:52]	Memory Core:	I was going to suggest a 'classic mode' checkbox
[07:52]	Mojito Sorbet:	Making it flexible WOULD require XUI engine changes
[07:52]	Robin Cornelius:	yes but the benifit would be worth it
[07:52]	Robin Cornelius:	not everyone wants the same UI
[07:52]	Morgaine Dinova:	technically, everything is possible. But I expect that reverting to V1 type UI is impossible for political reasons now, as well as for the valid reason that a small proportion of residents actually like V2 UI. So the only way forward I see is to make it switchable.
[07:52]	Memory Core:	But I guess that's been suggested in JIRA multiple times
[07:52]	Imaze Rhiano:	all users are not ready to accept anymore V1 UI - there are some people that like from V2 (not me)
[07:52]	Robin Cornelius:	i like some bits of 2.0, some bits of 1.X
[07:52]	Mojito Sorbet:	That is not the only way forward
[07:53]	Oz Linden:	I rather doubt that a single-switch to the old UI will get by product review. It's too difficult to figure out how new things fit into that.
[07:53]	Mojito Sorbet:	Explain "Product Reiew"
[07:53]	Mojito Sorbet:	Who is that, now that T is gone?
[07:53]	Boroondas Gupte:	also, single switch doesn't give the flexibility we want.
[07:54]	Qie Niangao:	(some of us don't even want the same UI from one login to another... no reason to change settings one at a time to get from "combat" to "machinema" modes, for example)
[07:54]	Robin Cornelius:	a good starting target might be the profile window, allow this to be a floater or a sidebar and allow it to show more info as a floater
[07:54]	Robin Cornelius:	repeat and rince
[07:54]	Oz Linden:	That's a good question, Mojito... to some extent it's still being sorted out (and yes, that's no better an answer for us than it is for you)
[07:54]	Morgaine Dinova:	Qie: This is why I've been advocating putting a Viewer API between the guts of the viewer and the UI. It would allow that flexibility.
[07:54]	Robin Cornelius:	i can disable the entire sidebar using just XUI now and some viewer fixes i have
[07:54]	Chantal Harvey:	machinima ppl are basicly interested in media on a prim, and hiding ui (not possible anymore in the latest update) and crisp textures, rezztimes performance
[07:55]	Robin Cornelius:	but i need settings and options to flip the outputs to the approprate floaters
[07:55]	Oz Linden:	Personally, I like the idea of being able to move things around and customize them, and then save those as a named collection of settings
[07:55]	Oz Linden:	then I can have different settings for different purposes
[07:55]	Qie Niangao:	yes
[07:55]	Robin Cornelius:	Chantal you can hide the UI using skinning
[07:55]	Oz Linden:	build-your-own-viewer-modes
[07:55]	Chantal Harvey:	skinning?
[07:55]	Morgaine Dinova:	Yep Oz. That's what we used to advocate (for over a year) in the UXIG group.
[07:55]	Robin Cornelius:	but some of this is not in the main line code
[07:55]	WolfPup Lowenhar:	shouts: Hello Ardy and welcome to Hippotropolis a new game of Zungo Multi will be starting shortly.
[07:55]	WolfPup Lowenhar:	shouts: Hello Boroondas and welcome to Hippotropolis a new game of Zungo Multi will be starting shortly.
[07:55]	WolfPup Lowenhar:	shouts: Hello Chantal and welcome to Hippotropolis a new game of Zungo Multi will be starting shortly.
[07:55]	WolfPup Lowenhar:	shouts: Hello Imaze and welcome to Hippotropolis a new game of Zungo Multi will be starting shortly.
[07:55]	WolfPup Lowenhar:	shouts: Hello Kaylee and welcome to Hippotropolis a new game of Zungo Multi will be starting shortly.
[07:55]	WolfPup Lowenhar:	shouts: Hello Latif and welcome to Hippotropolis a new game of Zungo Multi will be starting shortly.
[07:55]	WolfPup Lowenhar:	shouts: Hello Melchizedek and welcome to Hippotropolis a new game of Zungo Multi will be starting shortly.
[07:55]	WolfPup Lowenhar:	shouts: Hello Memory and welcome to Hippotropolis a new game of Zungo Multi will be starting shortly.
[07:55]	WolfPup Lowenhar:	shouts: Hello Mojito and welcome to Hippotropolis a new game of Zungo Multi will be starting shortly.
[07:55]	WolfPup Lowenhar:	shouts: Hello Morgaine and welcome to Hippotropolis a new game of Zungo Multi will be starting shortly.
[07:55]	WolfPup Lowenhar:	shouts: Hello Opensource and welcome to Hippotropolis a new game of Zungo Multi will be starting shortly.
[07:55]	WolfPup Lowenhar:	shouts: Hello Oz and welcome to Hippotropolis a new game of Zungo Multi will be starting shortly.
[07:55]	WolfPup Lowenhar:	shouts: Hello Qie and welcome to Hippotropolis a new game of Zungo Multi will be starting shortly.
[07:55]	WolfPup Lowenhar:	shouts: Hello Robin and welcome to Hippotropolis a new game of Zungo Multi will be starting shortly.
[07:55]	WolfPup Lowenhar:	shouts: Hello Techwolf and welcome to Hippotropolis a new game of Zungo Multi will be starting shortly.
[07:55]	WolfPup Lowenhar:	shouts: Hello Thickbrick and welcome to Hippotropolis a new game of Zungo Multi will be starting shortly.
[07:55]	Robin Cornelius:	i've got skins working in 2.0
[07:56]	Latif Khalifa:	lol
[07:56]	Robin Cornelius:	in 2.1
[07:56]	Boroondas Gupte:	cool
[07:56]	Robin Cornelius:	i have one skin with a hidden UI totaly
[07:56]	Mojito Sorbet:	The high-end music software packages, like SONAR, do excatly that. Savable layout settings.
[07:56]	Oz Linden:	Wolfpup - you've got to turn that off before you show up here,
[07:56]	Robin Cornelius:	and i fixed full screen
[07:56]	Boroondas Gupte:	o/
[07:57]	Thickbrick Sleaford:	umm, even web browsers and word processors do that.
[07:57]	Thickbrick Sleaford:	(movable UI)
[07:57]	Mojito Sorbet:	In SONAR you can dock/undock, resize, move things around change colors, then save that whole things. Multiple times, under different names
[07:57]	Mojito Sorbet:	Even across multiple monitors
[07:57]	Morgaine Dinova:	The Zbrush UI paradigm.
[07:57]	Robin Cornelius:	i think a lot of this is possible and easily reachable
[07:58]	Ardy Lay:	We need a window manager and configuration manager for it?
[07:58]	Mojito Sorbet:	Sounds like
[07:58]	Qie Niangao:	It's a bit like Outfits, though: which bits to save in the named setting? Personally, windlight and all the rendering atmospherics are important for me, in addition to UI layout
[07:58]	Mojito Sorbet:	And none of this "The new layout will be available next time you log in" crap
[07:58]	Memory Core:	if you need a manager just for UI elements
[07:58]	Latif Khalifa:	but manu controls have beem destroyed usabilty wise by the need to squeeze them into the side bar. simply rearrainging them around is not sufficient to fix viewer2 ui
[07:59]	Boroondas Gupte:	once we freed them, we can fix them again
[07:59]	Robin Cornelius:	but in most cases its pretty easy to add a button almost anywhere and get it to do almost any buttons function, thats pretty trivial in XUI need a way to do it dynamicly in the viewer
[07:59]	Robin Cornelius:	and you can build complexitiy on that, a button, a whole pannel etc..
[08:00]	Mojito Sorbet:	It may be that the entire XUI approach needs redesign
[08:00]	Mojito Sorbet:	In order to be that flexible
[08:00]	Robin Cornelius:	but first i would like to see the XUI supporting as much as possible for flexibilty then add a "editor" or something to enable a plesent way to edi tit
[08:00]	Mojito Sorbet:	Yes, at least have it write back the XML file after I have manually tweaked the appearance
[08:00]	Robin Cornelius:	yes
[08:01]	Mojito Sorbet:	So I do not have to guess what the tag is for "the color of this button here"
[08:01]	Robin Cornelius:	actually with my skining it can leave default alone and write to a custom skin so you can always revert to default
[08:01]	Oz Linden:	Some changes seem to persist now, while others don't
[08:01]	Robin Cornelius:	or even dowload others skins
[08:01]	Mojito Sorbet:	A whole market for skins, like there is for Gnome
[08:02]	Mojito Sorbet:	Well, not market". "Library"
[08:02]	Oz Linden:	One person suggested that UI skins should be in-world tradable assets
[08:02]	Boroondas Gupte:	robin, can you attach what you have to SNOW-614
[08:02]	Latif Khalifa:	Robin, write xui in user dir when it's modified, never touch the original files (since the OS will not let you modify the install anyway) [#SNOW-614] Detect UI skins at runtime
[08:02]	Boroondas Gupte:	(mabe to the sub-task)
[08:02]	Robin Cornelius:	Latif +1, viewer already supports reading from that under the layered UI system
[08:02]	Oz Linden:	it should work like translations... if your skin doesn't modify it, you get the installed default
[08:03]	Robin Cornelius:	already supported
[08:03]	Oz Linden:	So what's in the way of people creating and posting better skins?
[08:03]	Techwolf Lupindo:	emerald had so many skins that they had to move to downloadable skins/themes due to the file count got over 8K at one point for the install.
[08:03]	Mojito Sorbet:	undocumented tags
[08:03]	Morgaine Dinova:	No need for a window manager. This is what you do: Allow any number of panels of any shape to be placed anywhere (typically very thin ones on the 4 edges, but that's up to the user). Then allow any button, menu entry, widget, data field, etc, to be dragged to one of your defined panels. And finally, allow the current setting to be stored to a named preset. Provide pre-defined presets out of the box, eg. New Resident, Tutorial, Builder, Machinma, Live Events, etc, so that Support can start with "Please press Tutorial Preset".
[08:04]	Robin Cornelius:	the first step to skins is to get my work committed and add a skin selector to preferences
[08:04]	Mojito Sorbet:	I once asked Q, how do I find the right piece of XML to edit to change this certain color. His answer was "read the code"
[08:04]	Morgaine Dinova:	Eg. drag a folder to an edge.
[08:04]	Mojito Sorbet:	I do not take that as a serious answer
[08:04]	Oz Linden:	If it's the only answer that anyone can give, then it is.
[08:05]	Morgaine Dinova:	Q means well I think, but his answers are often unfortunate.
[08:05]	Oz Linden:	That's not saying it's a good thing, but it's honest
[08:05]	Robin Cornelius:	we need something where you can inspect the UI and be told which XML controls it
[08:05]	Mojito Sorbet:	So you really have no internal documentation at all??
[08:05]	Oz Linden:	I didn't say that... I don't know, but Q wouldn't lie about it
[08:06]	Latif Khalifa:	Robin, does your skinning work do anything to remove lower level stuff from the UI handling? Like sending network packets from UI controls?
[08:06]	Oz Linden:	and even if there is documentation, if it differs from the code then which would you rather get?
[08:06]	Mojito Sorbet:	I once worked on a largish project and we had an internals manual for it nearly 2 inches thick
[08:06]	Morgaine Dinova:	The past is past. The answer is to document everything new as it gets created now, so that the future is brighter than the past.
[08:06]	Imaze Rhiano:	How did you get those up-to-date, Mojito?
[08:06]	Mojito Sorbet:	And assign some summer intern to documenting what already exists
[08:07]	Techwolf Lupindo:	Documation can be updated easer then starting anew every time there is a change.
[08:07]	Mojito Sorbet:	The internals manual?
[08:07]	Mojito Sorbet:	The person changing the code was REQUIRED to update the internals doc at the same time
[08:07]	Imaze Rhiano:	ouchie
[08:07]	Morgaine Dinova:	Developers should not be ALLOWED to deliver code without documentation. They haven't completed part of their job.
[08:07]	Mojito Sorbet:	Otherwise the wrldwide support teams could not find bugs
[08:07]	WolfPup Lowenhar:	i agree if there was documentation in the code it would make things a lot easier to do
[08:08]	Mojito Sorbet:	Not IN the code.
[08:08]	Oz Linden:	So everyone here is completely ok with my requireing that every submission include documentation updates and test plans, right?
[08:08]	Mojito Sorbet:	Though putting it IN the code in a way that can be extracted would be an improivement over now
[08:08]	Oz Linden:	(the correct answer is "Of Course")
[08:08]	Qie Niangao:	(Dzonatas would be screaming about now, I think)
[08:08]	Mojito Sorbet:	Of course. :)
[08:08]	Latif Khalifa:	lol
[08:08]	Mojito Sorbet:	But only after we see LL doing the same thing
[08:08]	Latif Khalifa:	it doesn't like that in the real world :P
[08:08]	Morgaine Dinova:	Yes Oz. That includes Lindens and FOSS developers of course, and external contractors if any.
[08:08]	Oz Linden:	Let's not pick on Dzonatas when not here
[08:08]	Imaze Rhiano:	if you want that nothing doesn't happen - Of course, Oz
[08:09]	Techwolf Lupindo:	Oz, the problem with that is there is NO documation to begine, how the heck are we supposed to supplie doc with patch?
[08:09]	Qie Niangao:	no, I didn't mean to pick on Dzonatas... it's that there's a counter argument that I'm not equipped to voice.
[08:09]	Latif Khalifa:	I don't think the documentation is the biggest problem here, not at all
[08:09]	WolfPup Lowenhar:	wen i made the date stamp code i tried to put in a simple explanation as to what it did and was tole to move it to a header in the patch file
[08:09]	Latif Khalifa:	and requiring every code subition to contain the documentation works only in Utopia
[08:10]	Oz Linden:	The only way to fix the lack of documentation and unit test coverage is to require that if you touch something undocumented or untested, you fix that as part of whatever change is being made
[08:10]	Morgaine Dinova:	Latif: agreed. There are many contributing factors, documentation is only one.
[08:10]	Imaze Rhiano:	/me agrees with Latif - or in goverment projects
[08:10]	Mojito Sorbet:	Latif, how about at least routine-level comments in extractable format?
[08:10]	Techwolf Lupindo:	How to documant the object cache fix? it was just a typo.
[08:10]	Latif Khalifa:	I think the major systems in the viewer should have documentation, like XUI for example, on how to use, modify,etc
[08:11]	Aleric Inglewood:	I think we have a more urgent problem than documentation at the moment :(
[08:11]	Morgaine Dinova:	Routine-level comments are very useful, and easy to extract with doxygen. But they don't cover everyone, in particular macro-scale design info.
[08:11]	Oz Linden:	I don't care nearly as much about specs (which in my experience are always out of date) as I do about unit tests. Good tests are executable specs
[08:11]	Boroondas Gupte:	Well, getting something back to how it should work (according to the, maybe hypothetical, documentation) shouldn't require additional documentation.
[08:11]	Morgaine Dinova:	don't cover everything*
[08:11]	Latif Khalifa:	unit tests don't help at all with UI flaws which is the main complaint about viewer2
[08:11]	Mojito Sorbet:	The object cache FIX does not need documenting so much as the way the cache is SUPPOSED to work in the firts place
[08:12]	Boroondas Gupte:	+Mojito
[08:12]	Aleric Inglewood:	Oz: On what time scale can we see the move to Mercurial? And when does LL start to actually merge snowglobe patches upstream?
[08:12]	Morgaine Dinova:	Oz: specs only get out of date if there's no process to keep them up to date. Team managers need to work a bit harder for their wage.
[08:12]	Techwolf Lupindo:	Oz, the object cache fix had no DOC to begine with, so no one knew there was supposed to be a _working_ object cache to begine with.
[08:13]	Mojito Sorbet:	And the use of inline string constants is bad pracice!
[08:13]	Boroondas Gupte:	about that: VWR-17801 [#VWR-17801] Wrong submenu character when you right click on yourself
[08:13]	Mojito Sorbet:	As someobody once told me, "anything written in two places is wrong in at least one of them"
[08:13]	Oz Linden:	Hi Aleric - Robin started that discussion before you arrived, but as usual it got hijacked into a UI discussion (although a more productive one than usual, thank you everyone)
[08:13]	Aleric Inglewood:	Maybe we can get back on topic then :)
[08:14]	Oz Linden:	I like that, Mojito (see my previous comments re: specs vs code)
[08:14]	Oz Linden:	We've been doing some work on the move to hg - that part won't be long, which will make the other easier
[08:15]	Latif Khalifa:	Oz, "doing some work" for years now, it's not good enough
[08:15]	Aleric Inglewood:	I'm known for being direct, so let me do that now too: there is serious talk about forking Snowglobe and continuing without Linden Lab. The reason is stopping to believe that "it" is ever going to work. Hence, I'd think that discussion snowglobes future has a priority.
[08:15]	Aleric Inglewood:	pokes Robin
[08:16]	Mojito Sorbet:	Which is why putting the description in doxygen format improves the odds of the doc being correct.
[08:16]	Oz Linden:	I agree, Latif, it's not, which is why I'd prefer not to talk about it until I can just say "here it is"
[08:16]	Morgaine Dinova:	Forking Snowglobe would avoid the Contrib Agreement issue. But I'd rather leave forks as a last resort.
[08:16]	Robin Cornelius:	One of snowglobes key objectives was to make it easier to get code into the viewer and IMHO this is failing
[08:16]	Mojito Sorbet:	But you stkill need to write the high-level doc, that describes how things fit together.
[08:16]	Robin Cornelius:	*into the main line LL viewer
[08:16]	Latif Khalifa:	it's failing big time
[08:16]	Mojito Sorbet:	For comparison,. by the way, the Naali project viewer has EXCELLENT internals documentation
[08:17]	Oz Linden:	I love doxygen ... how do people feel about requiring it?
[08:17]	Latif Khalifa:	and that's another "we're working on improving that!" we hear endlessly. deeds, not words are required
[08:17]	Mojito Sorbet:	Snowg;pbe is already forked. The fors are named Emerald, Kirsten, etc
[08:17]	Robin Cornelius:	doxygen is good we already pass the viewer source through doxygen for 1.x and 2.X
[08:18]	Latif Khalifa:	you either want to run a opensource project or not, it's really that simple...
[08:18]	Mojito Sorbet:	It needs some meat to chew on.
[08:18]	Mojito Sorbet:	Latif+
[08:18]	Morgaine Dinova:	That's true, Latif
[08:18]	Aleric Inglewood:	There are two reasons why that failing is bad: 1) it's not what was promised, and what is worse: 2) it will kill snowglobe on the long run because soon Merov will not be able to do the merging anymore and we would spend all our time re-doing old patches and fixing bug introduced by the merge with an incompatible 'upstream' code base.
[08:18]	Aleric Inglewood:	The two should not deviate this much. It simply is not going to work like this.
[08:19]	Mojito Sorbet:	Which gets me back to my first question: do more people work on viewers for SL as LL employees, or as TPV developers?
[08:19]	Robin Cornelius:	yes code bases deviating is a major problem in this case
[08:19]	Oz Linden:	Since I don't know the real numbers for either, I can't answer that, Mojito
[08:19]	Latif Khalifa:	it does not really matter Mojito. What matters is that the process is broken and there is no visibile effort to fix it. Words don't count
[08:19]	Robin Cornelius:	its ok having some things different but the core and majority needs to be the same
[08:20]	Techwolf Lupindo:	viewer-externial will not build on any 64-bit system. They ripped out code from viewer_manifest.py
[08:20]	Aleric Inglewood:	Mojito: every 'behind the wall' info is a secret it seems for some reason, but I got a Linden that in the past with a "roughtly 30 viewer coders", .. however that was before so many Linden were 'let go'...
[08:20]	Aleric Inglewood:	Linden to answer*
[08:20]	Mojito Sorbet:	I have difficulty beleiving it is as high as 30
[08:20]	Latif Khalifa:	we don't even have a suurce drop for the current viewer... doesn't look good for fixing more serious problems
[08:20]	Boroondas Gupte:	Oz, can you turn perl to non-verbose?
[08:21]	WolfPup Lowenhar:	that is true robin even working to get the viewr to build with newer versions of VS takes a couple of days work on other things befor you can even get tit to run after compile with the newer VS
[08:21]	Oz Linden:	perl passive
[08:21]	Boroondas Gupte:	thanks :-)
[08:21]	Chantal Harvey:	lol
[08:21]	Techwolf Lupindo:	/me thinks perl code
[08:22]	Mojito Sorbet:	I have difficulty beleiving it is as high as 10. Not counting QA, if there is any
[08:23]	Latif Khalifa:	Oz, perhaps a dedicated meeting about "Future of Snowglobe" project is in order?
[08:23]	Aleric Inglewood:	Oz: Do you think there is any chance that snowglobe will be made the "upstream", and everyone, including the Lindens will work on the same repository? And proprietary development would then be derived from that (not the other way around)
[08:23]	Aleric Inglewood:	(We could have many branches, of course)
[08:23]	WolfPup Lowenhar:	+1 aleric
[08:23]	Oz Linden:	Q, Esbee, and I are doing a presentation Sunday at SLCC on the future of the viewer
[08:23]	Mojito Sorbet:	There is an idea. Let the proprietary stuff be the fork.
[08:23]	Oz Linden:	You'll all want to see it
[08:24]	Techwolf Lupindo:	How? Is there a video stream?
[08:24]	Chantal Harvey:	woo
[08:24]	Oz Linden:	I'm pretty sure it will be available IW
[08:24]	Chantal Harvey:	is that inworld too
[08:24]	Chantal Harvey:	good
[08:24]	Imaze Rhiano:	when?
[08:24]	Robin Cornelius:	Yes SLCC should be streamed, talk in AWG from Fleep about thar
[08:24]	Oz Linden:	waiting for confirmation on that
[08:24]	Morgaine Dinova:	I think the issue hinges largely on Linden's undoubted position of "It's our viewer, and we are going to control it." It sounds harsh, but the open source aspect of SG boils down to "You can fix our bugs for us".
[08:24]	Techwolf Lupindo:	If the in-world requires 2.x, then i'me out.
[08:24]	Oz Linden:	of course, you'll have to use a viewer with media capability :-)
[08:24]	Latif Khalifa:	lol
[08:24]	Latif Khalifa:	way to go :P
[08:25]	Techwolf Lupindo:	1.x does have media. Parcel vidio.
[08:25]	Latif Khalifa:	exclude 3 out of 4 residents :P
[08:25]	Robin Cornelius:	just use firefox to watch it
[08:25]	Aleric Inglewood:	voice doesn't work (and is not my fault)
[08:25]	Oz Linden:	I don't actually know what the SLCC folks have set up
[08:25]	Boroondas Gupte:	Maybe the stream URI can be posted on opensource-dev in advance?
[08:25]	Chantal Harvey:	i am moderator there
[08:25]	Oz Linden:	Yes, when I know what to post I'll post it
[08:25]	Boroondas Gupte:	:-)
[08:25]	Robin Cornelius:	as far as i know Fleep Tuque has been working on this as well
[08:25]	JoJa Dhara:	I believe also MBC with Mal burns is trying to stream on Livestream
[08:26]	Robin Cornelius:	was taking about streaming it the other dat
[08:26]	Chantal Harvey:	fleep will instruct us
[08:26]	Aleric Inglewood:	Oz: will my question be answered then?
[08:26]	Aleric Inglewood:	this one:
[08:26]	Oz Linden:	/me has to tone down that smoke
[08:26]	Aleric Inglewood:	Oz: Do you think there is any chance that snowglobe will be made the "upstream", and everyone, including the Lindens will work on the same repository? And proprietary development would then be derived from that (not the other way around)
[08:27]	Aleric Inglewood:	Imho, that is the ONLY way that snowglobe (and open source) can survive.
[08:27]	Morgaine Dinova:	Aleric++
[08:27]	Latif Khalifa:	+1
[08:27]	Oz Linden:	Aleric - in the spirit of "doing, not talkinig", I'm going to wait 1 week to answer that
[08:27]	Morgaine Dinova:	And that also means, no NDA for open source development.
[08:28]	Morgaine Dinova:	/me waits expectantly for Oz's 1 week or so :-)
[08:28]	JoJa Dhara:	Hello Fleep ;-)
[08:28]	Fleep Tuque:	Hiya :)
[08:28]	Chantal Harvey:	hi fleep
[08:28]	Morgaine Dinova:	/me waves at Fleep
[08:28]	Oz Linden:	We've never required NDAs for open source contributions (that I know of); only for contract work
[08:28]	Fleep Tuque:	Heard there was a question about streaming of Oz's panel at SLCC
[08:28]	Boroondas Gupte:	NDA? LL has required NDAs from contractors and closed-beta testers, but AFAIK never from OSS devs.
[08:28]	Morgaine Dinova:	Oz: we are referring to Linden's work on the open source code.
[08:28]	Latif Khalifa:	Q said he will be talking more about the structure after reorg, but then of course he fails to show up at 3 out of 4 his OH ;)
[08:28]	Oz Linden:	yes, Fleep
[08:29]	Techwolf Lupindo:	viewer 2.x was keep closed for so long that a third party viewer got depley entrenced into the residents.
[08:29]	Techwolf Lupindo:	deeply
[08:29]	Oz Linden:	Not fair, Latif, I have not missed nearly that many
[08:29]	Latif Khalifa:	Oz, I said Q, not you
[08:29]	Morgaine Dinova:	Linden is not acting as a bona fide open source developer in doing the work on a GPL viewer in secret.
[08:29]	Fleep Tuque:	In world there are three options - With viewer 2 you can watch Ustream on a prim OR listen to audio only stream if you don't have viewer 2 OR you can watch the UStream channel directly on the web.
[08:29]	Oz Linden:	ah, Q... don't pick on him when he's not here to defend himself
[08:30]	Fleep Tuque:	No Quicktime broadcasting for parcel media I'm afraid.
[08:30]	Oz Linden:	Maybe that should be another Oz OH rule.... no picking on absent people
[08:30]	Chantal Harvey:	ok
[08:30]	Fleep Tuque:	QT broadcasting is just too flaky
[08:30]	Latif Khalifa:	it's not picking, it's stating a fact
[08:30]	Techwolf Lupindo:	Fleep Tuque, what about parcel media? There is an video and audio there.
[08:30]	Fleep Tuque:	Parcel media will be audio only stream
[08:30]	Boroondas Gupte:	why that?
[08:31]	Fleep Tuque:	If you want to see video, can use Media on a Prim in viewer 2 or watch directly on the web
[08:31]	Fleep Tuque:	on UStream
[08:31]	Latif Khalifa:	watching on ustream directly is plenty good
[08:31]	Fleep Tuque:	Because QuickTime Broadcast is a major pain in the rumpus.
[08:31]	Chantal Harvey:	that is pretty good, lagwise
[08:31]	Fleep Tuque:	:P
[08:31]	Robin Cornelius:	Fleep you are more than welcome to set up a parcel media stream here on Hippotropolis on my land
[08:31]	Latif Khalifa:	where will be the URLs be announced?
[08:31]	Oz Linden:	Fleep - if you can email me the details for our session, I'll relay to the opensource-dev list
[08:31]	Aleric Inglewood:	Oz: read my IMs before you /quit please :) (no need to reply if you don't want to)
[08:31]	Fleep Tuque:	On this page as soon as I get it done http://www.slconvention.org/in-world/
[08:32]	Fleep Tuque:	The UStream channels are already up
[08:32]	Latif Khalifa:	cool, thanks Fleep
[08:32]	Robin Cornelius:	Well with the URLs i'll set up a screen here as well on parcel media
[08:32]	Techwolf Lupindo:	What are the dates?
[08:32]	Boroondas Gupte:	:-)
[08:32]	Fleep Tuque:	http://www.ustream.tv/channel/slcc1 through http://www.ustream.tv/channel/slcc6
[08:32]	Latif Khalifa:	this Sunday Tech
[08:32]	Latif Khalifa:	I mean Oz'es big reveal :)
[08:32]	Fleep Tuque:	Which will also be embedded in our site http://www.slconvention.org/
[08:33]	Fleep Tuque:	We are doing everything we can to make the streams as accessible as possible
[08:33]	Techwolf Lupindo:	GAh, can we get rid of flash on that page? My browser just locked up on that page.
[08:33]	Fleep Tuque:	minus QuickTime ;)
[08:33]	Fleep Tuque:	Um. No?
[08:33]	Fleep Tuque:	:)
[08:33]	Fleep Tuque:	UStream uses flash
[08:33]	Oz Linden:	Time's up folks... I need to go back to doing....
[08:33]	Chantal Harvey:	finally got flash working in w7 64
[08:33]	Qie Niangao:	Thanks Oz
[08:33]	Techwolf Lupindo:	Fleep, you just offended me. That was not a nice responce there.
[08:33]	Latif Khalifa:	lol Tech
[08:33]	Imaze Rhiano:	so... sue her :P
[08:33]	Fleep Tuque:	?
[08:33]	Fleep Tuque:	I can't make UStream change the way they stream hehe
[08:33]	Techwolf Lupindo:	bye.
[08:34]	Latif Khalifa:	Oz, take care, and please make opensource downloads of 2.1 available :)
[08:34]	Oz Linden:	sorry - what's missing Latif?
[08:34]	Latif Khalifa:	the source
[08:34]	Latif Khalifa:	no svn tags, no source tarballs
[08:35]	Oz Linden:	Ah.... yes
[08:35]	Imaze Rhiano:	I can see 3 tech & opensource disccussion scheduled in SLCC
[08:35]	Oz Linden:	Some of the slippage there is because Merov is on vacation
[08:35]	Oz Linden:	He'll be back next week
[08:35]	Latif Khalifa:	2.1 has been out for a month now, and we had beta 1 2 and 3 before that too
[08:35]	Latif Khalifa:	none of which have either tags or source tarballs
[08:36]	Oz Linden:	I hear you. I can't fix it until Merov is back (or rather, it would take me longer than it would take to wait)
[08:36]	Boroondas Gupte:	LL shouldn't leave all the busywork to Merov. Publishing and taging the source should be a required part of the release process.
[08:36]	Latif Khalifa:	Boroondas, exactly
[08:37]	Boroondas Gupte:	Btw., we should (re)formalize the release process for snowglobe, too. We're much less organized than back in Rob's time.
[08:37]	Morgaine Dinova:	Humans don't scale anyway. ;-) Need to make that automatic.
[08:37]	Oz Linden:	I agree, B.
[08:37]	Oz Linden:	gotta go all
[08:37]	Latif Khalifa:	tc Oz

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User:Oz Linden/Office Hours Archive 2010-08-09

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