Open Development User Group/Archive/2011-04-06

13:01	Oz Linden	hi folks
	Office Orb	mail_to set to oz@lindenlab.com
		Start transcription to oz@lindenlab.com
		Transcript will be sent to: oz@lindenlab.com
	Morgaine Dinova	Hi Oz :-)
	draconis.neurocam	hello oz
	Morgaine Dinova	Hi Yuzuru :-)
		Hi Draconis :-)
	draconis.neurocam	hello morgaine
	Yuzuru	Hi Morgaine.
13:02	Oz Linden	OPEN issues....
	Morgaine Dinova	How's autobuild coming along Oz?
13:03	Oz Linden	https://jira.secondlife.com/secure/IssueNavigator.jspa?reset=true&jqlQuery=project+%%3D+%%22Open+Development%%22+AND+assignee+is+EMPTY+AND+status+%%3D+%%22Awaiting+Review%%22++ORDER+BY+createdDate%%2C+priority+DESC
		It's working pretty well
		I think most people have adapted to it
		I'm trying to get a few changes merged to better support VS Express edition devs
13:04	draconis.neurocam	woos
	Oz Linden	that's OPEN-50, and is coming along ok
	Office Orb	http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/OPEN-50 OPEN-50 As an Open Source developer I would like a single set of configurations, which work for both Visual Studio and Express version of VC.
	Morgaine Dinova	Is the new workflow given on the wiki? Or is it hidden behind the usual cmake .; make?
	Oz Linden	OPEN-57
	Office Orb	http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/OPEN-57 OPEN-57 As a developer, I want to be able to override the local platform for manipulating and testing the configuration
	Oz Linden	this is one I created, so I'll Accept it :-)
13:05		that's really there for the autobuild devs to look at....
		but I've been keeping them distracted with other things....
		open-59
	Office Orb	http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/OPEN-59 OPEN-59 3p-google-breakpad does not build on suse linux
13:06	Oz Linden	autotools revision mismatch... an oil barrel full of worms
	Morgaine Dinova	Google needs a kick up the backside. Somehow they've got themselves into a position of using totally non-standard build tools for a long of things, and for some reaon nobody gives them a hard time over it.
13:07	Oz Linden	they're using a really old version?
		am I reading that right?
	draconis.neurocam	they need their own version of oz, haha
	Oz Linden	now there's an idea....
13:08		ahem..
	Morgaine Dinova	I notice a number of packages in Gentoo now that are being masked and 30-day removed with the stated reason "Lacks even a minimally reasonable build system". :P
	Oz Linden	I'm not sure what we'll be able to do about this one
13:09		For autotools packages, we've taken the position that we should be able to start with the configure script rather than going all the way back to generating it from configure.ac....
		but in this case that's a fail
13:10		I'll Accept it for now, but I think we will probably just blame it on upstream and punt
	Morgaine Dinova	Agreed, most packages have perfectly fine ./configure, and don't need running autogen.sh even when it's present.
13:11		Yep. You can't solve all the world's problems.
	বরুনদাশ গুপ্তে	What's the topic? (Sorry for being late.)
	Morgaine Dinova	Although finding an alternative is ... an alternative. :P
		Hi Bor :-) Autobuild
	Oz Linden	now we're on open-54
	Office Orb	http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/OPEN-54 OPEN-54 Inconsistent CMake variable name for JsonCpp include dir(s)
13:12	Oz Linden	so you're just in time !
	বরুনদাশ গুপ্তে	Didn't we triage that one on Monday already?
	Oz Linden	apparently I didn't do anything with it
		if I assign it to you will you do a patch, B?
	বরুনদাশ গুপ্তে	yep
13:13		though, there's another issue with JsonCpp that's more important (I've noticed OPEN-54 while examining that other problem)
13:14		wanted to write about that other problem on th ML, but didn't get to it, yet
	Oz Linden	well, if you want to add the bigger problem, feel free - list is probably a good idea
		last is open-34
	Office Orb	http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/OPEN-34 OPEN-34 Handle empty files in install.cache gracefully
13:15	বরুনদাশ গুপ্তে	in short, we should not have json/include as include dir, because it contains a header that name-conflicts with a system header
	Morgaine Dinova	Uh oh.
	Oz Linden	what's the system header?
	বরুনদাশ গুপ্তে	features.h
13:16	Oz Linden	is it included as just "features.h" anywhere?
		meaning the json version
	বরুনদাশ গুপ্তে	not in the viewer
		I guess it's a standalone-only problem
		dunno if json's features.h even gets packaged for the LL prebuilts
13:17	Morgaine Dinova	Bor, what's the workflow for a standalone build now, using autobuild? (Linux). I'll kick a build off now.
	বরুনদাশ গুপ্তে	the solution seems straight forward: use the parent dir as include dir and have the #includes for jsoncpp relative to that
	Oz Linden	yes
13:18	বরুনদাশ গুপ্তে	but ... the parent dir has changed names in the prebuilds recently, so I wonder what it's name is on various distributions
	Oz Linden	I consider standalone issues to be pretty low priority, but if you can come up with a fix that doesn't break our builds, I'm fine with it
	বরুনদাশ গুপ্তে	thus why I want to ask on the ML before proposing a fix
13:20	Oz Linden	it seems that there are some additional cases that open-34 needs to address (I had closed that)....
13:21		which finishes the triage
		Boroondas added a question about why STORM-968 was closed Won't Finish
	Office Orb	http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/STORM-968 STORM-968 An API to wrap objects for thread-safe access.
	Oz Linden	it's true that I should have put a comment on that... my apologies
	বরুনদাশ গুপ্তে	np
13:22	Oz Linden	Mostly because it's not worth the trouble in this case.
	বরুনদাশ গুপ্তে	ic
	Oz Linden	Especially given that Aleric has made clear that he's no longer interested in contributing
13:23		It is a good problem to solve, but unless we're going to not only create a solution mechanism but also apply it everywhere, it doesn't add any value
13:24	বরুনদাশ গুপ্তে	How much work would it be to apply it everywhere?
	Oz Linden	everywhere that there _might_ be a threading issue?
	Morgaine Dinova	Wouldn't it make you develeopers' lives easier? And reduce bug rates, because a symmetric solution is adopted?
	Oz Linden	Years of work
13:25	বরুনদাশ গুপ্তে	And partial adoption would not lead to partial benefits already?
	Oz Linden	The problem with that is no threading/locking solution that is applied in only part of the code actually means anything
		not really
	বরুনদাশ গুপ্তে	alright :-\
13:26	Oz Linden	Don't get me wrong... I do think it's a bullet we should bite, and the sooner the better
	Morgaine Dinova	That is true. But it's also true that hacky approaches to concurrency are a major cause of bugs. Don't defend them :P
	Oz Linden	but that patch is only the first 5%% of the solution, and didn't come with someone willing to even participate in the other 95%%
13:27		there are many possible general solutions ... I'd rather let whoever takes on the whole problem decide what the solution should be
	Morgaine Dinova	Hard problem, if you're looking not only for code, but for devs who will maintain that code. They're not being paid after all.
	বরুনদাশ গুপ্তে	are the remaining 95%% difficult or just busywork? If the latter, maybe we could start a community hackatron
13:28	Oz Linden	Oh, that's not the sort of problem I expect open devs to solve
	Morgaine Dinova	Hehe, hackatron
	Oz Linden	no, they are most definitely not hackathon problems
13:29		to do multithreaded code you have to get a real understanding of the big picture, or you can really mess things up
	Morgaine Dinova	I think Oz is right on that one. Concurrency issues really are a "Design authority knows best" thing.
	বরুনদাশ গুপ্তে	yeah
13:30	Oz Linden	There is no shortage of problems open devs can take on ....
	Morgaine Dinova	Not many things fall under that category, because not many things in software are the work of the devil. Concurrency + shared state is :P
13:31	Oz Linden	once rewrote unix pipe support for multiprocessors - did it with only one global lock that only had to be help briefly during accept....
	Ima Mechanique	sorry I'm late
	বরুনদাশ গুপ্তে	Work of the devil, hu? I guess that's why there are sometimes nasa demons?
13:32	Morgaine Dinova	Hi Mr Resident
		chuckles
	draconis.neurocam	oz what would you say is the state of the documentation of autobuild on the wiki, does LL feel satisfied with it, or is there more to come?
	Ima Mechanique	please... call me Ima
		I'm no one's mister
	Morgaine Dinova	lol
13:33	Oz Linden	I think we still need to update and simplify the environment docs, and the how-to-build-your-own-packages doc
	Ima Mechanique	could I get a nc of what I missed please? ;-)
	Oz Linden	mostly the individual platform how-to-build pages need to be trimmed down a _lot_
13:34		I'll post a transcript when we're done, Ima
	Ima Mechanique	okay
	Morgaine Dinova	Because building is now simple, so previous levels of detail not needed? Or some other reason?
	Oz Linden	the Orb knows all.... :-)
		yes, essentially
	বরুনদাশ গুপ্তে	They already got trimmed somewhat, didn't they?
13:35	Oz Linden	one of the major goals of autobuild is to make the commands for building simple and uniform
		if you've got the tools installed correctly (which does differ by platform) the actual build is the same everywhere no matter what you're building
13:36	Ima Mechanique	it does that, but it can't make the setting up your environment simple and unifor :-( and that accounts for much of the wiki pages
	Oz Linden	I'm actually very big on linking in wikis - I hate pretty much any time something is duplicated
	Ima Mechanique	yeah, duplication leads to unsynced docs
	বরুনদাশ গুপ্তে	transclusions are sometimes useful, too, but tend to confuse unaware editors
	Oz Linden	I also want to rip out essentially everything about building old versions, and there's still a fair amount of that scattered around
13:37		I use transclusions quite a bit
	Ima Mechanique	hmm shouldn't that just be archived somewhere
	Oz Linden	it's all archived... any time you edit a page, the old version is still there
	Ima Mechanique	I'm not a fan of destroying documntation, you never know when someone may need it again
13:38	Oz Linden	there's a tradeoff - if having the old stuff around makes it harder to find the current stuff, then it's a big net loss
	Ima Mechanique	true, but the wiki history requires a level of wiki-fu many do not have
	Morgaine Dinova	Nothing is ever destroyed in wiki. Although sometimes takes some finding
	বরুনদাশ গুপ্তে	Though, the page history isn't really the friendliest possible interface to get documentation for building past verions.
13:39		because the documentation ususally lags behind the code, you can't really use the release dates as a code -> documentation version mapping.
	Oz Linden	I'm much more worried about current and new devs being able to quickly and easily become productive on what we're doing now than on preserving the ability to build something we stopped doing 2 years ago
	Morgaine Dinova	Is setuptools-0.6.15 goods enough for easy_install?
	Ima Mechanique	can wiki pages be renamed?
	বরুনদাশ গুপ্তে	Yup, making documentation of the current process good is a priority.
13:40	Ima Mechanique	or moved to another dir?
	Oz Linden	yes, they can
	বরুনদাশ গুপ্তে	Ima, yes
	Ima Mechanique	then creating a compl=ileing/archived is a possibility
		that makes it obvious they're out of date
	Oz Linden	But, for example, if it were easy to do (it isn't), I'd just permanently delete how to build Snowglobe
13:41		I would prefer to make that as hard to find as possible
	Morgaine Dinova	lol
	Oz Linden	but fortunately for those who want it, I'm too lazy to go to the requisite bother
	Ima Mechanique	okay compiling/in/some/difficult/to/guess/location/archived ;-)
	Oz Linden	I like that
13:42	বরুনদাশ গুপ্তে	:-P
	Morgaine Dinova	A page nice and clearly labelled Historic_Links solves all. Elegance isn't really required.
	Ima Mechanique	and ONLY have alink to it on the current docs
	বরুনদাশ গুপ্তে	You can't really control who links what from where.
		It's a wiki
	Oz Linden	anyway... at the moment there are several things higher priority than fixing those pages
13:43	Ima Mechanique	true, but only officially create the one
	Oz Linden	The various pieces I've been waiting for to put together a build farm for open devs are coming together, so I'll be spending more time on that
13:44	বরুনদাশ গুপ্তে	:-)
	Ima Mechanique	nice
	Oz Linden	It's laziness again... I won't have to do so many builds for other people if they can do them on directly :-)
	Morgaine Dinova	God. "easy_install autobuild" ---> error: Sandbox Violation: mkdir("/var/tmp/root"). Fricking Pythonistas, they really like to scribble globally during installation.
13:45		hacks around it
	Oz Linden	is not a Python fan, but LL likes it
	Ima Mechanique	hiya Robin witchey
13:46	Morgaine Dinova	It's not a Python problem, it's a Pythonista problem :P
	বরুনদাশ গুপ্তে	I like the language. Dunno yet whether I like their install system(s) ...
	Robin Cornelius	Hi, all
	Morgaine Dinova	Hiya Robin!
	বরুনদাশ গুপ্তে	hi Robin :-)
	draconis.neurocam	anything language that tries to be platform independant is good in my book
	Ima Mechanique	recently I've become an anti fan of the installing system ;-)
	Oz Linden	you don't really need to install autobuild
13:47	Ima Mechanique	I found it easier not to, installing on Windows is broke
	Oz Linden	if you just get the 'autobuild' main script into your path, you can run it right out of the hg working copy just fine
	draconis.neurocam	ah, well, that would be nice to have known
	Ima Mechanique	yup, that's what I do
	draconis.neurocam	haha
	বরুনদাশ গুপ্তে	could it also be run by using the full path the to executable as command? or would that break at recursive invocations?
	Morgaine Dinova	Oh, it's no problem, workarounds are plenty.
	Oz Linden	they've beeen working on that a lot, and claim to have made progress, but since I expect to be fiddling with it a lot, I just decided to always use my main working copy
13:48	Ima Mechanique	also easier to keep updated, just pull and update ;)
	Oz Linden	I have not tried, Boroondas
		running it through a symlink worked (on MacOS)
	বরুনদাশ গুপ্তে	cool
13:49		how do I uninstall something instealled by easy_install, btw?
	Ima Mechanique	cygwin has a few troubles with it
	বরুনদাশ গুপ্তে	(or update it, etc.?)
	Ima Mechanique	but I think that's connected to the install issues on windows
	Oz Linden	dunno
	Morgaine Dinova	looks for easy_remove
	Oz Linden	easy_nuke
13:50	বরুনদাশ গুপ্তে	ah, easy_install -m
		http://thingsilearned.com/2009/04/13/easy_install-uninstalling/
13:51		(dunno if manually removing the .egg is really required ... except using some disc space, it won't do anything when left behind, will it?)
13:52	Oz Linden	So... Ima.... we were discussing the VS edition-independent abstration problem
	Ima Mechanique	might hatch if kept warm
		lol we were, but that's not what I was asking the ping for ;-)
		but sure, love to talk about it more
	Morgaine Dinova	Bor, looks like different versions of easy_install take different flags then, because my -m is "make apps have to require a version" (it means "--multi-version")
13:53	Oz Linden	the question (I think) is: is it possible to create a shell function or a python wrapper or something that would work for both Pro versions with and without Incredibuild and also for Express users , with autodetection ?
		that's the Holy Grail
13:54	Ima Mechanique	IO think so, the incredibuild case is already handled by those functions
		if msbuild is used autodetection isn't really needed
	Oz Linden	if you can enhance those functions to cover the express case?
		but is that compatible with incredibuild?
13:55	Ima Mechanique	msbuild works for both Full VS and Express *provided* the .NET 4 build framework is used
		incredibuild is handled separately
		those function check for an INCREDIBUILD env var
	Oz Linden	and is that what our current setup instructions say to do (I have not checked, since I don't use windows)
13:57	Ima Mechanique	I'm no expert on incredibuild, you'd have to talk to your devs about that, but moving to msbuild would do no harm, and it might allow them to expand on the incredibuild support. If as I guess those function were ritten for simplicities sake
	Oz Linden	Bronson... you're the second av I've seen today with a transparent midsection....
	Morgaine Dinova	With autobuild, has cmake disappeared completely, or merely disappeared from view, and is used underneath?
	draconis.neurocam	its the avatar physics stuff
		it doesnt always like to load
	Ima Mechanique	um, you have no setup instruction concerning that part of autobuild, that I've seen at least
	Oz Linden	I'll discuss it with the windows devs when I get a chance
13:58		cmake is still used inside
	Ima Mechanique	from view Morgaine
	Morgaine Dinova	kk, tnx
	Ima Mechanique	although not used on the libs so far as I have seen
	Morgaine Dinova	That explains why cmake .; make still works on Kokua then, which is just V2 repackaged for now.
13:59	Ima Mechanique	most if not all of those just use a build-cmd.sh
		which confused the heck out of me ;-)
14:00	Office Orb	Your timer has expired!
	Morgaine Dinova	glares at Office Orb ... :P
	Ima Mechanique	you'll have to glare much harder to get it to be quiet
	Morgaine Dinova	Haha
14:01	Oz Linden	I've got quite a list of enhancements for the Orb....
	বরুনদাশ গুপ্তে	Morgaine, Kokua hasn't integrated the autobuild stuff, yet
	Morgaine Dinova	k Bor
	Oz Linden	if only I had time for fun scripting....
	draconis.neurocam	lsl isnt always fun, it is a lot of the time
	বরুনদাশ গুপ্তে	but yeah, using cmake and make manually should still work ... autobuild just calls those, too, after all
14:03	Ima Mechanique	Oz when you have time I have post-mortem from testing your open-50 repo ;-)
	Office Orb	http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/OPEN-50 OPEN-50 As an Open Source developer I would like a single set of configurations, which work for both Visual Studio and Express version of VC.
14:04	Oz Linden	send me email, please, Ima ... I am going to knock off for dinner soon
	Ima Mechanique	sure thing
	বরুনদাশ গুপ্তে	Morgaine, you asked about the current standalone build process
14:05	Morgaine Dinova	Oh yeah
	বরুনদাশ গুপ্তে	currently, I build viewer-dev like so:
		patch -p1 < ../../../patches/autobuild-standalone.diff patch -p1 < ../findjson_2.diff autobuild install glh_linear PATH="/usr/lib/ccache/bin:${PATH}" autobuild configure -c OpenSourceStandAloneDebug -- -DWORD_SIZE=64 -DGLH_INCLUDE_DIR=`pwd`/build-linux-i686/packages/include/ autobuild build -c OpenSourceStandAloneDebug --no-configure -- -j3
	Morgaine Dinova	lol @ patch. OK :-) Thanbks Bor
	Robin Cornelius	i've got less than that on my command line
	বরুনদাশ গুপ্তে	autobuild-standalone.diff is from OPEN-38
	Office Orb	http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/OPEN-38 OPEN-38 Fixes for viewer-autobuild for standalone
	Robin Cornelius	json and glh_linear are debinazed
14:06		so i just need --standalone and -DWORD_SIZE
	বরুনদাশ গুপ্তে	"--standalone" ?
	Morgaine Dinova	-DWORD_SIZE coz you're on 64-bit?
	বরুনদাশ গুপ্তে	yep
14:07	Robin Cornelius	forgot i don't need standalone as thats implict in one of the targets
	বরুনদাশ গুপ্তে	it's hardcoded to 32 in the xml, so I have to override that
	Robin Cornelius	so just word size then ;-)
	Oz Linden	I'd be more interested to see 64 bit autobuild packages built for the dependencies and then a build of the viewer using them
	Ima Mechanique	that's something I want to do for Windows Oz
14:08		however, seems a long way off just now :-(
	Oz Linden	If I had that in hand, it might be easier to sell the Lab on just picking it up
		the "just" in there is still a big deal, of course
		if you build it, you've gotta test it, etc....
		but that's another bullet we'll have to bite eventually
14:09	বরুনদাশ গুপ্তে	yeah ... though building all dependencies from 3p-, potentially having to fix 64bit issues on them first is more work than just building standalone. don't have time for that, currently
	Morgaine Dinova	SO "autobuild build -c OpenSourceStandAloneRelease" would do it on 32-bit then>
	Oz Linden	Anyway... I need to wrap up.
	বরুনদাশ গুপ্তে	Morgaine, yes
	Morgaine Dinova	Cheers
	Robin Cornelius	Morg yes, but if you did that on a 64bit host expect fail
	Office Orb	End transcription
	Ima Mechanique	oz we figured you had when the orb went *ping* so to speak
	Morgaine Dinova	Thanks Oz, good meeting
	Robin Cornelius	you can build non standalone on 64bit fine, it builds as 32bit and does the right thing