Mono/2008-02-29

[15:08]  Periapse: So I'll just go ahead and start. Looks like just you two!
[15:09]  Periapse: Oh, wait, here comes Rex
[15:09]  Periapse: Hi, Rex
[15:09]  Siann Beck: Hey there Rex.
[15:09]  Rex Cronon: hi periapse
[15:09]  Rex Cronon: hi siann
[15:09]  Rex Cronon: hi avie
[15:09]  Rex Cronon: davie*
[15:09]  Periapse: So here's what's been going on in Monoland since last week
[15:09]  Rex Cronon: .
[15:09]  Davie Zinner: Hi Rex
[15:10]  Periapse: We did an update as you know, and it seems to have had some side effects...
[15:10]  Periapse: Because of compiler changes, pre-update bytecode will not run properly, and may crash the sim
[15:11]  Rex Cronon: maybe u should post a notice or something like that
[15:11]  Periapse: So old scripts will be very unstable. But if you recompile to Mono they should work again.
[15:11]  Periapse: We actually did, yesterday.
[15:11]  Siann Beck: It's in the blog.
[15:11]  Periapse: The announcement about the db refresh.
[15:12]  Rex Cronon: haven't looked at blog for almost 2 days
[15:12]  Siann Beck: But a group notice might not be a bad idea.
[15:12]  Periapse: But you see we thought that we had this problem addressed.
[15:12]  Periapse: Yesterday Babbage changed the key for Mono scripts.
[15:13]  Periapse: This is supposed to make the VM not even try to run old bytecode, but give you an error instead.
[15:13]  Siann Beck: Yes, I've seen that.
[15:13]  Periapse: However, Siann, it's possible that in your case, it's either not working, or the key mismatch error is itself crashing the sim
[15:14]  Siann Beck: OK.
[15:14]  Periapse: http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/02/28/beta-preview-database-refresh-scheduled-for-monday-march-3-2008/
[15:14]  Siann Beck: Well, like I say, it's just that one object.
[15:14]  Periapse: That's the blog post.
[15:14]  Periapse: Right. Just that one object, maybe some kind of race condition on when it was compiled
[15:14]  Periapse: who knows
[15:14]  Siann Beck: But right now, absolutely nothing of mine is working under Mono, not even my simple little height detector.
[15:15]  Periapse: Have you recompiled?
[15:15]  Siann Beck: Yes.
[15:15]  Periapse: So if you have a simple repro, say for the height detector, JIRA it up.
[15:15]  Periapse: How does it fail?
[15:15]  Siann Beck: Here in Goguen I get a system error; in the other Mono sims I just get null results.
[15:16]  Height Detector MONO:  is 0.000000 meters tall (0' 0.00"), including shoes.
[15:16]  Siann Beck: OK, now it's not giving the system error.
[15:16]  Siann Beck: But null results.
[15:16]  Periapse: Of course
[15:16]  Periapse: And if you recompile to LSL?
[15:16]  Height Detector MONO:  is 0.000000 meters tall (0' 0.00"), including shoes.
[15:16]  Rex Cronon: wow. i am 2d now?
[15:16]  Height Detector MONO: Siann Beck is 1.800744 meters tall (5' 9.07"), including shoes.
[15:17]  Siann Beck: lol
[15:17]  Periapse: and then back to Mono?
[15:17]  Height Detector MONO: Rex Cronon is 1.950373 meters tall (6' 3.98"), including shoes.
[15:17]  Rex Cronon: works
[15:17]  Height Detector MONO: Periapse Linden is 1.885922 meters tall (6' 1.87"), including shoes.
[15:17]  Height Detector MONO:  is 0.000000 meters tall (0' 0.00"), including shoes.
[15:17]  Height Detector MONO:  is 0.000000 meters tall (0' 0.00"), including shoes.
[15:18]  Periapse: yuk. Yeah, I'll bet this is something with the value semantics changes.
[15:18]  Periapse: This was the major work that Babbage did for this version
[15:19]  Periapse: it's code that gets executed ubiquitously, so any problems with it could show up anywhere
[15:19]  Siann Beck: Right.
[15:19]  Periapse: We have so far had to re-open half of the tickets we thought were fixed.
[15:19]  Siann Beck: Hm.
[15:19]  Siann Beck: Have you seen SVC-1712? That's a very bizarre one.
[15:20]  Periapse: Naturally this is going to be highest priority for Babbage right now.
[15:20]  Periapse: I'm looking that one up right now
[15:20]  Periapse: Oh, yeah, Strife's crasher.
[15:20]  Siann Beck: Yeah.
[15:21]  Periapse: So I don't think this version is going to be around much longer.
[15:21]  Periapse: We will do an update as soon as we can.
[15:21]  Siann Beck: OK
[15:21]  Periapse: I don't think that rolling back is an option
[15:21]  Periapse: Given the finagling we've done with the keys, and the db refresh for Monday
[15:22]  Siann Beck: Rather pointless, anyway, since pretty much everything's been tested that can be under that one.
[15:22]  Rex Cronon: what happend with the keys?
[15:22]  Periapse: Speaking of which, I should make sure you all know the implications of that db refresh
[15:23]  Periapse: Rex -- we changed the key for valid Mono bytecode to prevent old bytecode messing up the VM
[15:23]  Periapse: It's in the blog post I linked earlier
[15:23]  Rex Cronon: ok. for a sec i thought u were talking about all the keys in the db:)
[15:23]  Periapse: oh, sorry, no
[15:23]  Periapse: lol
[15:24]  Periapse: Now the db refresh on Monday is for this whole grid.
[15:24]  Periapse: Has nothing to do with simulator or client
[15:24]  Periapse: We pull all user data and inventory over from the Main Grid
[15:25]  Periapse: This means that accounts created since the last time of a refresh, i.e. people who can't currently log on to this grid, will be able to.
[15:26]  Periapse: It also means that your current inventory on this grid will be wiped, and replaced with a snapshot of your main grid inventory
[15:26]  Periapse: So if there are any scripts that you *developed* here (and don't have in inventory on the main grid) you will need to back them up offline
[15:26]  Periapse: with a cut/paste to a file.
[15:27]  Siann Beck: I do all my coding outwindow anyway, and c/p here.
[15:27]  Rex Cronon: the cut/past has become standard procedure for me
[15:27]  Periapse: It also means that things that you have developed on the main grid and have not seen here yet will now be accessible
[15:27]  Siann Beck: Yay!
[15:27]  Siann Beck: And if there's anything over there you want here, make sure it's in your inventory there.
[15:27]  Periapse: I have this new pair of shoes that I can't wait to get over here :-D
[15:28]  Siann Beck: lol
[15:28]  Rex Cronon: unless u plan to script them, u should be ok
[15:28]  Periapse: lol
[15:28]  Siann Beck: I changed my pw a few weeks ago, and it's been a PITB switching back and forth :)
[15:29]  Periapse: Right! That's something else I didnt' think of.
[15:29]  Periapse: So as of Monday you'll be in sync again.
[15:29]  Periapse: It's possible that we may have a griefer window open for the first couple of days after the refresh
[15:30]  Periapse: As you know, griefer accounts are typically very young, since they get banned readily. Normally they can't go to other grids because they haven't been around long enough to get sync'ed
[15:31]  Periapse: But I think we have plenty of ways of crashing these MONO sims without griefer intervention.
[15:31]  Siann Beck: Heh!
[15:32]  Periapse: So that's about it. To sum up:
[15:32]  Periapse: This latest update seems to have made things rather unstable, several new bugs and re-opening of old ones.
[15:32]  Periapse: We changed the key to prevent old bytecode from loading.
[15:33]  Periapse: We will work as fast as we can to get a newer, more stable version out.
[15:33]  Siann Beck: Great.
[15:33]  Periapse: And there will be a db refresh on Monday
[15:33]  Rex Cronon: until the next version is out, will things be in kind of a limbo?
[15:34]  Periapse: Well, we'll keep the regions up. Vektor is actually ablle to test, so some people probably can also.
[15:34]  Siann Beck: Maybe it just doesn't like scripts written by me :)
[15:34]  Periapse: Our focus will be first on the crashers, and then move on to the re-opened issues.
[15:35]  Rex Cronon: not a lot of people here
[15:35]  Periapse: Our test harness runs fine. But now we have a few new things to add to it.
[15:35]  Rex Cronon: i guess people not interested in mono?
[15:35]  Periapse: Well, traffic has been trending down since the opening.
[15:36]  Periapse: So has the number of bug reports filed
[15:36]  Periapse: Though we are starting to see that number climb again ;-)
[15:36]  Siann Beck: Personally, I've been waiting for the update, as I've tested everything I can with the previous version.
[15:37]  Siann Beck: I imagine there are others in that category.
[15:37]  Periapse: Oh, one other thing. Last week we found a case where one region would not startup properly
[15:37]  Periapse: We're still looking into it. I tried restoring simstates to no avail.
[15:37]  Periapse: Lots of Mono errors in the log.
[15:37]  Rex Cronon: there might be those that are waiting for havok4 and mono together
[15:38]  Periapse: Vektor did some old-skool SL magic and brought the region up.
[15:38]  Siann Beck: That too.
[15:38]  Periapse: Yes. I think we'll need to make Mono more stable before Sidewinder will allow us to play together.
[15:38]  Periapse: Right now we're a bad influence ;-)
[15:38]  Siann Beck: lol
[15:39]  Periapse: So any other questions?
[15:39]  Rex Cronon: none here
[15:39]  Siann Beck: I can't think of anything.
[15:40]  Periapse: Well, Siann, I'm going to make sure that Babbage and Scouse are aware of the problems you've been having with things that worked fine before.
[15:40]  Siann Beck: OK.
[15:40]  Periapse: But please do JIRAfy
[15:40]  Siann Beck: I'll see what I can come up with.
[15:40]  Periapse: He will need something to actually get ahold of to figure out what happened.
[15:40]  Siann Beck: OK.
[15:41]  Periapse: That height detector might be a good example.
[15:41]  Siann Beck: I don't like to post "It doesn't work!"
[15:41]  Siann Beck: Yeah.
[15:41]  Periapse: If you can make me a watcher on the issue, go ahead. If you can't feel free to IM me with the number.
[15:41]  Rex Cronon: there are quite a few free scripts
[15:42]  Siann Beck: OK.
[15:42]  Rex Cronon: and lots of other scripts might be based on those
[15:42]  Periapse: Rex? Free scripts where?
[15:42]  Rex Cronon: http://rpgstats.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page
[15:43]  Siann Beck: I'm going to get going, I need to get over to the main grid. I'll do some testing later and see if I can't post some JIRA(s).
[15:43]  Periapse: Thx, Siann
[15:43]  Davie Zinner: See you Siann
[15:43]  Siann Beck: See you all later.
[15:43]  Rex Cronon: and i know that in world there are more available
[15:43]  Rex Cronon: bye
[15:43]  Periapse: I'll check it out.
[15:44]  Periapse: So if you gentleman don't have other questions I guess we'll wrap up this office hour
[15:44]  Davie Zinner: I'm good until Monday :-) Thanks Peri
[15:44]  Rex Cronon: no qustions
[15:44]  Rex Cronon: have a nice day
[15:44]  Periapse: Great. Stay tuned to the blog for updates. Have a great weekend