Open Source Meeting/2008-07-17

< Open Source Meeting
== Agenda ==
* Windlight settings in particular and and the future of these settings, in particular the day cycles. My patch (cooking) introduces the ability to have multiple day cycles. What about being able to play these in sequence or randomly too to get variable days? Michelle2 Zenovka 05:13, 17 July 2008 (PDT)
* UI widgets, decoupling from the viewer and/or other widget sets Michelle2 Zenovka 05:15, 17 July 2008 (PDT) 
== Action items ==
* Rob Linden - drum up interest in fixing up Viewer Architecture page
== Raw Transcript ==
* [14:01] Rob Linden: howdy folks
* [14:01] Jumpman Lane: hi
* [14:01] Squirrel Wood: Hello Rob!
* [14:01] Nyx Linden: greetings
* [14:01] Carjay McGinnis: evening Rob
* [14:01] Rob Linden: transcript being saved for eventual posting to wiki.secondlife.com
* [14:02] Rob Linden: is only one meeting behind
* [14:02] Soft Linden: Hello world\n
* [14:02] Squirrel Wood: ^^
* [14:02] Rob Linden: https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Open_Source_Meeting/Agenda
* [14:02] Carjay McGinnis: greetings Soft
* [14:02] Soft Linden: Hey hey hey
* [14:04] Carduccis Sticky: Green: puff puff pass... the air is full of weed smoke
* [14:04] Rob Linden: oh...there's Michelle
* [14:05] Michelle2 Zenovka: ha everyone
* [14:05] Rob Linden: First item: Windlight settings in particular VWR-5917[c
* [14:05] Jumpman Lane: hi dissie
* [14:05] Disie DeCuir: Hi Jumpy
* [14:05] Michelle2 Zenovka: anyone have any comments on the patches or the ideas to have multiple windlight days?
* [14:06] Rob Linden: scans the list of Lindens for someone who might know
* [14:07] Squirrel Wood: A little bit of variation should turn out really nice. Now if you can get weather effects it that would rock ^^
* [14:07] Michelle2 Zenovka: yea, once you can define multiple days, being able to play them randomly or sequence them woiuld be cool
* [14:08] Soft Linden: I like that idea. Might be most effective to push for votes if you want to convince people it's super-wanted
* [14:08] Michelle2 Zenovka: but yea, my patch does what it says on the tin, and there are a few lindens watching, Rob can ensure the internal tracker as a note that i've attached patches as the issues are quite old
* [14:09] Michelle2 Zenovka: Soft: need to open a new jira for that feature request, not done that yet
* [14:09] Rob Linden: I don't think anyone here is in a spot to speak with much authority on this topic
* [14:09] Jumpman Lane: well most of the time its night
* [14:09] Carduccis Sticky: Green: puff puff pass... the air is full of weed smoke
* [14:09] Rob Linden: ....so, prolly good to send something to sldev and call it a day
* [14:09] Jumpman Lane: or crappily lit dusk
* [14:10] Disie DeCuir: No..its lovely and sunny for me
* [14:10] Jumpman Lane: would addind more day "playlists" improve ANYTHING?
* [14:10] Michelle2 Zenovka: ack, i'll rebase to 20.14 and send to sldev and that should do ut
* [14:10] Soft Linden: Well, and a new JIRA as Michelle says. The big thing is new features need a bit more defense than bug fixes going in. We get a lot of pushback from peers who want to make sure each feature shouldn't be integrated into some larger initiative.
* [14:11] Soft Linden: So extra votes really help push those through.
* [14:11] Michelle2 Zenovka: yea sure, it looks like someone had good intentions for the windlight preferences, the day settings are on a tab but there are no other tabs and the code does hint at more
* [14:11] Jumpman Lane: cya
* [14:12] Disie DeCuir: smiles at all the nice lindens :-)
* [14:12] Rob Linden: Michelle2, that's right. I recall in the very early days of Windlight integration there were more ambitious plans around that area
* [14:13] Carjay McGinnis: sounds like good groundwork
* [14:13] Rob Linden: ...but those have probably been scaled back. However, I'll bet you if we figure out the right Linden to ask, we'll find out that they really want to get back around to it, and may be albe to provide some guidance
* [14:14] Carjay McGinnis: *sees a misLODed Aimee*
* [14:14] Michelle2 Zenovka: hopefuly they are the ones who have commented on the issues alread
* [14:14] Carjay McGinnis: ah, now you're ok
* [14:14] Aimee Trescothick: lol
* [14:15] Soft Linden: Zen Linden would be the one to ping for questions in that area. He's already posted a little on that to sldev - have a look at the "Windlight Assets" thread from last week.
* [14:15] Michelle2 Zenovka: Zen seemed keen on the jira to walk a patch
* [14:15] Soft Linden: Yup!
* [14:15] Rob Linden: cool....should we move on?
* [14:15] Rob Linden: takes that as yes
* [14:15] Rob Linden: UI widgets, decoupling from the viewer and/or other widget sets Michelle2 Zenovka 05:15, 17 July 2008 (PDT)
* [14:16] Michelle2 Zenovka: Following on from the various sldev discussions really
* [14:16] Rob Linden: yup...good thing to cover in realtime given the amount of traffic
* [14:17] JB Kraft: i, for one, am very interested in looking at that possibility
* [14:17] Soft Linden: We've got a pretty standard set of widgets. If there is a toolset that covers a superset of our uses and renders to GL efficiently, it seems an easy win
* [14:17] Rob Linden: well, I wouldn't say "easy win"
* [14:17] Michelle2 Zenovka: XUI could almost standalone as a seperate lib
* [14:17] Soft Linden: Yus.
* [14:17] Carjay McGinnis: not sure there is a fully GL using toolkit
* [14:18] Soft Linden: I was about to say - a good first step would be refactoring what we've got so it's neatly separated from the rest of the viewer.
* [14:18] Carjay McGinnis: I know Qt, FLTK and wxWidgets and neither makes full use of GL but I haven't seen the most recent incarnations of Qt4.x
* [14:18] Carjay McGinnis: indeed, it would make sense to work on what already exists
* [14:18] Carjay McGinnis: and is used and is tested
* [14:18] Soft Linden: It would make it easier to change libs - and to defend it as an unobtrusive change.
* [14:18] Rob Linden: I think it'd be good to do what it takes to enable experimentation in this area, since that will almost certainly involve making things more modular, and that just about has to be a good thing
* [14:19] Michelle2 Zenovka: and create some documentation whist we are at it ;-)
* [14:19] JB Kraft: the other option would be to pull it the UI out as a separate project, make it right, then fold the viewer window back in to the new framework
* [14:19] Boroondas Gupte: Blender might have a fully GL using toolkit. But I guess it's quite entangled with the rest of the application, like SL's XUI.
* [14:19] Soft Linden: It would also be another step toward isolating rendering - which *has* to happen eventually.
* [14:19] Rob Linden: I'd be careful about assuming a change at this point. There'd have to be a pretty compelling feature/stability/performance win to go through the pain of a switch
* [14:21] Rob Linden: the vibe I've gotten from Steve and others is that at the time XUI was investigated, there weren't any viable fully GL options
* [14:21] Rob Linden: ...but that we're not sooooo wedded to what we have that we wouldn't reevaluate
* [14:22] Michelle2 Zenovka: XUI seems pretty complete and seems to work ok, i think it could stand on it own and stay linked to the viewer
* [14:22] Michelle2 Zenovka: no need for a wholesale switch
* [14:22] Michelle2 Zenovka: just cleaner interfaces and better isolation so its not one big tangle
* [14:22] Carjay McGinnis: yeah, would be cool to be able to write tests without involving the viewer all the time
* [14:23] Rob Linden: yup
* [14:23] Nyx Linden: refactoring to separate the display of the GUI from the functionality of the program should be a clear win (modularity) whether or not we switch
* [14:23] Rob Linden: I think everyone agrees that untangling is a good goal
* [14:23] Liana Linden: indeed
* [14:24] Carjay McGinnis: yes, Nyx and it would give people the chance to test it and point out bugs that are currently hidden
* [14:24] Rob Linden: does anyone here have any immediate plans they need guidance on?
* [14:24] Aimee Trescothick: is still dreaming of dumping all the floaters on a second monitor
* [14:24] JB Kraft: whats the best way to tackle it?
* [14:24] Carjay McGinnis: yeah, that would be cool, Aimee
* [14:24] Michelle2 Zenovka: its quite a big project, and i have no idea of the tangle factor ATM
* [14:25] Soft Linden: Aimee: I'd be happy just to not have them in the main render area. They take up a non-trivial amount of the frame, which feels silly for static content.
* [14:25] Aimee Trescothick: yeah
* [14:25] Carjay McGinnis: the first monitor *is* my main render area, lol
* [14:27] Boroondas Gupte: also, having different update rates for UI and world (like we have for world and avatar pretenders) would be great, so visual lag can't turn the UI unreactable.
* [14:27] Rob Linden: I'm still mulling if there's something we can do here
* [14:28] Michelle2 Zenovka: sounds like threading hell :-)
* [14:28] Boroondas Gupte: yeah
* [14:28] Rob Linden: Michelle2: are you generally volunteering to take something on if you could be pointed in the right direction?
* [14:29] Michelle2 Zenovka: hmm, not sure, it looks a lot of work. and my time is some what limited
* [14:29] Rob Linden: ok...just trying to interpret one of your earlier statements
* [14:29] Rob Linden: too optimistically, it sounds like :)
* [14:29] Michelle2 Zenovka: hehe, what i want to do and what i can do are a bit different ;-)
* [14:30] JB Kraft: i would be happy to give it a kick rob, with some direction
* [14:31] Carjay McGinnis: that would be cool, JB
* [14:31] Rob Linden: JB: cool....how large a scope would you feel appropriate?
* [14:31] Michelle2 Zenovka: i'm happy to be involved if there is a group looking at things
* [14:32] JB Kraft: well, i would at least like to understand some high level goals from inside in order to determine how much i could do personally
* [14:32] JB Kraft: a map from inside would be most helpful to recruit other's assitance as well
* [14:32] Rob Linden: I think this roadmap is reasonably up to date:
* [14:33] Rob Linden: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Viewer_Roadmap
* [14:33] Rob Linden: the dates may have slipped a litte
* [14:33] Rob Linden: little
* [14:34] Carjay McGinnis: wow, nicely done
* [14:34] Michelle2 Zenovka: there is a lot of UI clean up in there
* [14:35] Michelle2 Zenovka: SO what was the goal of the discussion, to look at the feasibiltiy of spliting of the UI into a sperate standalone library, or to at least see where the line can be drwn for interface definiton
* [14:35] JB Kraft: yes, ok, doesnt seem to get to the class level there much but that is most helpful. perhaps documenting the existing hierarchy would be a good place to start?
* [14:36] Rob Linden: yeah, that might be.....I know that there was some recent volunteer work on that front
* [14:37] Rob Linden: tries to remember who was ddoing that
* [14:37] Michelle2 Zenovka: do you mean Dales Doxygen project http://doc.daleglass.net/
* [14:38] JB Kraft: woah, well that's only completely awesome :D
* [14:38] Carjay McGinnis: it's not that hard to generate
* [14:39] Rob Linden: that wasn't what I was thinking of, but that's nice to have
* [14:39] Carjay McGinnis: just takes a while
* [14:40] Michelle2 Zenovka: Yea its quite helpful but still does not solve all issues
* [14:41] Carjay McGinnis: it's not a substitute for proper documentation
* [14:41] Michelle2 Zenovka: hmm as people are trudging through code is it worth adding doxygen comments? i mean for lindens as well to start to get better documentation
* [14:41] Carjay McGinnis: it tells you how it works but not how to use it
* [14:41] Rob Linden: hmmm....I guess I was thinking of Scalar Tardis working on more docs in the area of caching
* [14:41] Rob Linden: well, I think a really super useful thing would be to help draw it out of us
* [14:42] Boroondas Gupte: o_O the viewer has a "Foo" Namespace???
* [14:42] Rob Linden: in general, you ask a dev to generate "more docs", and they don't konw where to begin
* [14:42] Michelle2 Zenovka: hehe yea
* [14:43] JB Kraft: you begin at the beginning and when you get to the end you stop ;)
* [14:43] Carjay McGinnis: if you want to do it right you would need to pair up a team, one guy designing the other documenting
* [14:43] Rob Linden: ...but if you ask questiosn that should be covered in the docs, and then you put the answers where you think they should go, there's no one person that's going too far out of their way
* [14:43] Carjay McGinnis: but since it's already written it's hard to do now
* [14:44] Nyx Linden: ERROR: documentation.end not found, symbol does not exist
* [14:44] JB Kraft: indeed, hehe
* [14:45] Boroondas Gupte: Just document what's being reworked. By the time everything is reworked we'll have full documentation ;-)
* [14:46] Rob Linden: ok, so there's this page here: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Viewer_Software_Overview
* [14:46] Rob Linden: most of the the text doesn't link anywhere
* [14:46] JB Kraft: well, i will try to start with the UI docs for existing and see what comes of that unless there is a better idea. at least that will help ppl understand what refactoring end decoupling makes sense. that sound reasonable?
* [14:47] Rob Linden: JB: where on the existing wiki would you look for that information?
* [14:48] Rob Linden: (I could post a link here, but I want to see where people look, so I'd be interested in everyone's answer)
* [14:48] Rob Linden: I've kind of biased it by posting a link already
* [14:48] Rob Linden: but probably not the best link
* [14:48] JB Kraft: actually, i would take the code apart mainly i think. i havent found info at that level on the wiki
* [14:49] Michelle2 Zenovka: Well currntly i would not as mostly the wiki is just overviews and as JB just said have to look at the code
* [14:49] Wilton Lundquist: My first shot might be... http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Documentation
* [14:49] Wilton Lundquist: At least I have that bookmarked.
* [14:49] Michelle2 Zenovka: Possibly this is a resource we are all miss/not using
* [14:49] Rob Linden: is becoming worried that we're being asked to create documentation that wouldn't get read
* [14:50] Wilton Lundquist: Another possible page for me would be... http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Viewer_architecture
* [14:50] Michelle2 Zenovka: well what i was refering to is doxygen tags in the source code, which would be directly readable by anyone browsing of formatted prerry by doxygen for example
* [14:50] Rob Linden: Wilton....that looks like where I think I would have wound up if I were asked the same question
* [14:51] Michelle2 Zenovka: thinks she can no longer type
* [14:51] Carjay McGinnis: doxygen tags are not enough usually
* [14:51] Wilton Lundquist: I have those as bookmarks. I can't tell you how I originally found them.
* [14:51] Rob Linden: there's some pretty detailed information at that Viewer architecture link
* [14:51] Carjay McGinnis: you need descriptions and examples, but ok, it can be done through Doxygen
* [14:52] Carjay McGinnis: but there are other formats like docbook
* [14:52] Rob Linden: it'd be really cool if someone (nudge) could then link some of the pages there to Dale's doxygen pages and/or svn.secondlife.com
* [14:52] Carjay McGinnis: which is supposed to be a good thing for documentation but I never looked too much into it
* [14:52] Boroondas Gupte: docbook isn't for in-code documentation, is it?
* [14:53] Michelle2 Zenovka: Comments of any type within the source code are alway helpful, even sometimes just rambling dev notes can help
* [14:53] JB Kraft: i agree
* [14:54] Rob Linden: Michelle2: "more comments" is sorta vague advice that I'm not sure is going to get us anywhere, though
* [14:54] Carjay McGinnis: yes, don't think it's meant to be used in-code
* [14:54] Rob Linden: we all know we should have better/more comments generally. however.....
* [14:54] Rob Linden: i++; // increment i by one
* [14:55] Rob Linden: ....that's not helpful
* [14:55] Carjay McGinnis: or // this is a quick hack, for details refer to internal JIRA 4332
* [14:55] JB Kraft: well, if we come at this top down the wiki makes sense, and if bottom up, doxygen seems sensible
* [14:56] Rob Linden: patches that improve inline comments are probably going to be welcome, especially if the comment is to document something it took you a while to figure out
* [14:56] JB Kraft: is there a meta on the JIRA for doc patches?
* [14:56] Carjay McGinnis: hm, I'm not convinced the code is the right place for this
* [14:57] Rob Linden: you all are in a better position to come up with the types of comments that will be useful
* [14:57] Carjay McGinnis: what you usually need is a general description of what is doing what
* [14:57] Michelle2 Zenovka: I think you need a little of both
* [14:57] Rob Linden: Carjay: for *some* things it is. wiki is right for a top-down view of the architecture, imho
* [14:57] Liana Linden: Oooh, I like the idea of documentation "patches"
* [14:57] Carjay McGinnis: I like to comment a lot myself actually but I'm not really sure it would be useful for other people
* [14:57] Michelle2 Zenovka: wiki can give overview and when you are drilling down doxygen gives specific details
* [14:58] Rob Linden: Carjay, if it's hard won knowledge, it's useful. Links in teh code back to the wiki would be cool, too
* [14:59] Boroondas Gupte: the aim would be to meet in the middle of top-down and buttom-up desription and link both ways
* [14:59] Carjay McGinnis: yes, if you add it when you write it, that's cool
* [14:59] Rob Linden: Boroondas: exactly
* [14:59] Carjay McGinnis: I was more or less referring to adding comments years later instead of putting down a descriptive text
* [14:59] Carjay McGinnis: but yeah, you need both
* [14:59] Rob Linden: well, we're coming up on the end of the hour here
* [15:00] Rob Linden: anything else before we take off?
* [15:01] Rob Linden: k...thanks everyone. I think I'l take the action item to really start getting some eyeballs on Viewer Architecture
* [15:01] Carjay McGinnis: thanks, Rob
* [15:01] Rob Linden: bye all!
* [15:01] Aimee Trescothick: runs off to UI office hour (Jacek's presentation)
* [15:01] Aimee Trescothick: waves
* [15:01] Michelle2 Zenovka: Bye rob, thanks
* [15:01] Boroondas Gupte: waves
* [15:01] Wilton Lundquist: Bye everyone.