SLDev-Traffic 21
sldev-traffic no 21
sldev discussions through July 22, 2007
Philip Linden, Rob Linden, Phoenix Linden - Live on Stage
Heading to OSCON? See Philip on Friday:
http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/os2007/view/e_sess/14656
Or see Rob and Phoenix:
http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/os2007/view/e_sess/14583
Or see all three!
Bridie Linden's Office Hours
Bridie Linden cracks the whip at Studio Blacklight, where most open source patches are imported, and where most of the everyday bugfixing activities begin. Bridie will be hosting her own triage sessions, starting Wednesday July 25 at 3pm. Check out all the details on the main blog:
http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/07/24/announcing-another-bug-triage-meeting/
Submitting Code Cleanup Patches
Alissa Sabre ran across some code with nonstandard variable naming, and wondered whether it would be appropriate to submit a cleanup patch. Sardonyx Linden pointed out that this kind of cleanup would eat up internal development time without likely gain.
In the general case, it's best to leave ugly code alone unless you're already submitting a patch touching the same code. If you are, you can be a bit more ambitious in reworking code, but try to keep it local in scope.
Patches!
Dzonatas Sol posted a patch that's helped seed some internal rework of the Linux CPU detection code. This will help quite a bit in tracking what hardware's really being used by SL residents. Of note, Linux viewer use by active residents is nearly 1% at present. This is atypical for a program with such a concentration of casual home users.
Alissa Sabre posted a new patch for "Input Method" improvement, attached to VWR-250. Alissa is soliciting feedback from anyone interested in improving Asian language handling. Posting comments against the JIRA would be ideal.
Able Whitman added the ability to see the L$-per-square-meter cost of land when making a purchase. VWR-1813
There are many more. Each week, you can search the JIRA for a significant listing beyond the above, which were announced for comment on-list.
Mute Visibility Preview
Able Whitman posted several previews of his "Mute Visibility" patch, allowing the suppression/reduction of unwanted objects. He's soliciting feedback, and not getting a number of takers commensurate with the large amount of discussion leading up to the patch.
If you want to give it a look, consider checking out the patch at:
http://ablewhitman.org/viewer/aw-41572.patch.zip
Dale Glass' Viewer
Dale Glass added autoupdates to his own build of the viewer, at http://sl.daleglass.net ... as always, use your judgement about code built by others. As more sldevers create their own builds, creating a set of best practices may be appropriate with regard to virus and spyware detection tools present on the build machine, and source labeling for reproducible builds from source.
QA Portal
Rob Linden links to QA Portal, a view into Linden Lab's quality assurance team, its processes, and information on how residents can get involved. More importantly, this is a good vehicle for providing feedback about Linden Lab's processes... if you see something that LL should be doing differently, please feel free to say so!
Visibility Culling
John Hurliman asked why the simulator does visibility culling, as opposed to the viewer. The key answer was that the viewer doesn't know where all objects are. All positions would need to be provided and updated for the viewer to make visibility decisions, whereas the simulator needs only know where the resident is, and which way he's facing.
The thread spidered out quite a bit with participation from multiple Lindens, and covered many small discussions about the effects of out-of-order packets and some discussion of ghosting. Unfortunately, the mail archive threading mechanism was broken by one resident's posts. Searching the thread page for "object culling" will bring up the related posts:
https://lists.secondlife.com/pipermail/sldev/2007-July/thread.html
OpenAL Patch - Windows Testing Wanted
Dzonatas Sol reported that some users were having problems with Vista and her build of the viewer, hypothesizing that the problem was fmod-related. Callum Lerwick took the opportunity to remind the list that he has OpenAL patches which could use testing against Windows:
http://www.haxxed.com/code/slviewer-1.17.1.0-openal-20070703.patch
Dana Fagerstrom is having good luck with openAL and the Solaris build, and Tofu Linden is adding free streaming support for Linux. Now would be a good time to move in and do some testing if you have a special interest in excising proprietary libraries.
JIRA Sandbox
Ever wanted to experiment with JIRA without getting chewed out for making a mess? Laurent Laborde has an experimental JIRA installed at http://bug.electrosphere.fr:8080/ and welcomes people to give it a prod.
If you accomplish anything interesting and helpful in the JIRA sandbox, consider filing a ticket on the Second Life JIRA asking for similar from Linden Lab.
Wiki and JIRA Upgrades
The public wiki received an additional machine, and the public JIRA saw another upgrade.
Does it hurt any less?
Thanks for readin'!