Open Source Meeting/2009-05-07

* [14:02] Morgaine Dinova: chuckles
* [14:03] Squirrel Wood: /ao off
* [14:03] Morgaine Dinova: waves at Squirrel :-)
* [14:03] Rob Linden: well...bummer. 2220 is a little crashier for me today than yesterday
* [14:03] Rob Linden: anyway, what I was going to do was put the agenda URL: https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Open_Source_Meeting/Agenda
* [14:04] Rob Linden: and then note that there isn't anything in it....doh!
* [14:04] Rob Linden: alright...well, let's talk about what I just posted to the wiki....
* [14:04] Techwolf Lupindo: I got a black screenn...oh there it is...
* [14:04] Rob Linden: I just updated this page: https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/SLDev_Viewer_Current_Cycle
* [14:05] Rob Linden: there's a couple of items we haven't talked about yet here, but we should
* [14:05] Techwolf Lupindo: Has any progress been made to make the viewer build work better with "cmake build" and "cmake install"?
* [14:05] Rob Linden: in general, we'd like to make it so that it's easier to rebrand the viewer
* [14:05] Rob Linden: Techwolf...I'll get to that in a sec
* [14:06] Saijanai Kuhn: oh neat
* [14:06] Techwolf Lupindo: Lag cross messages rob...
* [14:06] Rob Linden: my understanding is that Robin and Merov already had a conversation about the mods that Robin has made for omviewer
* [14:06] Robin Cornelius: Yes we had a quick chat
* [14:07] Merov Linden: confirms
* [14:07] Rob Linden: Robin: is that work available in a tidy patch?
* [14:07] Robin Cornelius: on the surface there is not a massive amount to change for a branding
* [14:07] Robin Cornelius: Rob , no not a tidy patch, that needs redoing.
* [14:08] Techwolf Lupindo: I think I remember some of that branding stuff. The secondlife.icon was causeing me a few issues getting the build to work right. Missing file causing error.
* [14:08] Robin Cornelius: that was mostly my builds i think as i removed it and then broke the manifest scripts
* [14:08] Rob Linden: Merov suggested the possibility of having a branding.h file or something like that....does that seem helpful and/or practical?
* [14:09] Rob Linden: clearly, there'd still need to be art assets separated out
* [14:09] Robin Cornelius: Rob what just about uisng viewer_version.h instead of another trival header wiht branding static strings
* [14:09] Merov Linden: We need to work on that
* [14:09] Rob Linden: Robin: good idea
* [14:10] Rob Linden: this is a "version" thing after all
* [14:10] Q Linden: why would it need to be static at all? couldn't it be all external files, no recompilation?
* [14:10] Robin Cornelius: version_viewer or what ever its called in llcommon/
* [14:10] Merov Linden: we certainly want to make it easy to substitute a brand by another
* [14:10] Rob Linden: hmmm....runtime changing of branding. I guess we do a lot of l10n stuff that way, don't we?
* [14:10] Robin Cornelius: Currently there are a few hard coded strings, i guess these could be made dynamic and loaded from settings
* [14:10] Morgaine Dinova: Instead of a separate compile-time header, wouldn't it be cleaner to have the viewer use a fixed code base instead, and to load in varying branding files instead?
* [14:11] Q Linden: now that we have the LLTrans mechanism, I think we could fairly easily make it runtime
* [14:11] Techwolf Lupindo: Rename the files to something really genertic so one can simpley brand by replace said file with there own. All branding files shold belong in one diretory so a third party can rm and replace it.
* [14:11] Q Linden: maybe a parallel file to strings.xml -- branding.xml?
* [14:11] Rob Linden: k....Q's right....using what we use (or want to use) for l10n is the right way to go
* [14:12] Merov Linden: Q: wouldn't that be a problem? a way for someone to "brand" something they don't really have any stake in?
* [14:12] Morgaine Dinova: That's a human problem, you'll never solve that in code :-)
* [14:13] Rob Linden: Merov: it's not as though someone can modify it for everyone.....they can already use a hex editor and "rebrand" their viewer today
* [14:13] Rob Linden: (as long as they keep it to 11 characters or less) :)
* [14:14] Merov Linden: true, and changing the app icon is easy enough also
* [14:14] Merov Linden: so indeed, not much depth in my argument
* [14:15] Rob Linden: so....what's the easiest way for someone to get started on this?
* [14:15] Rob Linden: we should probably get something in JIRA describing the job at hand
* [14:16] Merov Linden: was typing just that...
* [14:16] Merov Linden: +1 on JIRA
* [14:16] Rob Linden: Robin: is what you do right now a shell script you run over the code, or a patch you apply, or what?
* [14:16] Robin Cornelius: patch
* [14:16] Robin Cornelius: i have a big bad folder of 30+ patches I apply
* [14:17] Robin Cornelius: one of them is tradmark_compliance.patch which attempts to do this
* [14:17] Rob Linden: ah, cool
* [14:17] Merov Linden: sounds like a good start
* [14:17] Robin Cornelius: i gave up trying to patch secondlfie out *every* where as it got be conflicts every update so i on;y did the real major locations
* [14:18] Techwolf Lupindo: my 1.22.11 build has over 50 patches. The RC0 still has about 30.
* [14:18] Robin Cornelius: mostly the help->about was conflict city and i ended up putting a header on the front and leaving the rest intact
* [14:18] Rob Linden: ok....so it's really a matter of looking at that, and then applying the LLTrans mechanism to those spots
* [14:18] Rob Linden: looks at Help/About
* [14:18] Squirrel Wood: 1.23.1 out. mandatory update.
* [14:18] Q Linden: yus
* [14:18] Q Linden: Mandatory for RC users
* [14:18] Robin Cornelius: ugg
* [14:19] Robin Cornelius: oh
* [14:19] Robin Cornelius: thats ok
* [14:19] Rob Linden: get rid of your not-a-virus
* [14:19] Rob Linden: :)
* [14:19] Q Linden: grrs
* [14:19] Rob Linden: lol
* [14:19] Squirrel Wood: and where does one turn on shadows in it ? The option keeps hiding from me...
* [14:19] Melinda Latynina: ues, had to do the forced update to get here. hehe
* [14:19] Robin Cornelius: should help-about also have names of contributers/devs on http-texture/opensource viewer?
* [14:20] Techwolf Lupindo: Yea, I reember there was a GUI setting for it. Now its gone and there is no officeial work on how to enable it.
* [14:20] Rob Linden: Robin: good question....yes, we should figure out something better there
* [14:20] Robin Cornelius: and whist i remember, should we also have a seperate contributons/patches/updates list for http-texture changes
* [14:20] Robin Cornelius: so we all know what has changed from one easy reference point
* [14:21] Merov Linden: release note?
* [14:21] Poppy Linden: As far as branding, i feel like I've said this before, but why not copy what firefox does? Their nightly is "Minefield" - branding is separate from the code. Admittedly, I'm not very familiar with how they do what they do.
* [14:21] Melinda Latynina: yes, seems like a jub for the web
* [14:21] Techwolf Lupindo: I've contrubited one patch. Linden robot said to send in a contribitory agreement. So I did and havn't heard back from LL.
* [14:21] Robin Cornelius: it would form the basis of the release notes
* [14:21] Poppy Linden: 
* [14:22] Rob Linden: Poppy, I'm guessing they do something like the LLTrans thing
* [14:22] Robin Cornelius: currently release notes are not really updated this side of the firewall untill it goes live (i think) and certainly if i contribute something new i probably should update somthing rather than someone parsing SVN logs
* [14:22] Rob Linden: Robin: how about this page: https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/SLDev_Viewer_Current_Cycle
* [14:23] Melinda Latynina: but i do like the idea of adding oss contributors to the "about" floater. in fact, why even distinguish lindens from non? maybe add last names and just throw everyone into the mix together?
* [14:24] Robin Cornelius: Rob, yea i guess so, its a good home, some of the items just need a little edit and i think we are on to a winner
* [14:24] Rob Linden: cool
* [14:24] Rob Linden: (btw...still thinking on Help/About)
* [14:24] Merov Linden: also thinks it's a good list
* [14:24] Robin Cornelius: people should try to keep that upto date with their contributons/pending etc
* [14:25] Robin Cornelius: is the worst sinner of the lot
* [14:25] Merov Linden: Aimee is right behind you Robin :)
* [14:25] Aimee Trescothick: lol
* [14:26] Rob Linden: ok....so, I think we should make the Help/About cleanup into a JIRA task
* [14:26] Robin Cornelius: I'll do it Dreckly
* [14:26] Robin Cornelius: heh
* [14:27] Rob Linden: cool
* [14:27] Aimee Trescothick: heh, now there's a word I don't hear often in SL lol
* [14:27] Robin Cornelius: thinks Rob does not quite now the time frame with that
* [14:27] Robin Cornelius: s/now/know
* [14:28] Rob Linden: is lost
* [14:28] Robin Cornelius: seriously, i will look tomorrow at some of these issues
* [14:28] Techwolf Lupindo: gets confused between Rob and Robin on his screennn.\
* [14:28] Melinda Latynina: wow, what a freudian slip!
* [14:28] Aimee Trescothick: 
* [14:28] Rob Linden: anyway....another item: using Dejavu Sans as the font in the viewer
* [14:29] Robin Cornelius: its too wide and i get greif for it
* [14:29] Robin Cornelius: things don't quite fit like they do with the current no free font
* [14:29] Techwolf Lupindo: havn't tried rc1, so can't comment yet.
* [14:29] Robin Cornelius: i've been using it in omvviewer for ages, it looks fine but its that tiny bit wider so it wraps some windows
* [14:30] Rob Linden: Robin: how easy would it be for us to fix the wrapping issues?
* [14:30] Robin Cornelius: you could drop a point size but that goes the other way
* [14:30] Q Linden: "tiny bit wider" == even harder for l10n
* [14:31] Q Linden: we already have a lot of pain in, say, german
* [14:31] Robin Cornelius: people who have made profiles etc fit exactly with the current font in neat lines complain when its all one character out
* [14:31] Rob Linden: the interesting bit is that we already are using DejaVu Sans for some of our Cyrillic languages, I think
* [14:31] Morgaine Dinova: wonders what happened to the promise of scalable font technology
* [14:32] Merov Linden: that was when people cared about *print* Morgaine... last century... :D
* [14:32] Morgaine Dinova: Hehe
* [14:33] Melinda Latynina: automatic fitting of controls to their containers should provide the fix, and i think that's on the roadmap.
* [14:34] Rob Linden: so....in the interim....it seems like some XUI tweaks out to fix things when they get a little messed up
* [14:34] Rob Linden: are there any cases where the spacing issues are seemingly intractable?
* [14:34] Q Linden: map would be Hard
* [14:35] Q Linden: there are a couple of other floaters that would need to grow significantly if things get much wider
* [14:35] Merov Linden: how "much" is "much"?
* [14:36] Poppy Linden: is there anyway to work around that? change wordings?
* [14:36] Merov Linden: between the 2 fonts? (current and DjVu Sans)
* [14:36] Q Linden: merov, ramzi already squirms when trying to adapt german, etc
* [14:36] Robin Cornelius: always test your UI layout in german
* [14:36] Q Linden: it's not impossible, but the "right" solution is as melinda suggests
* [14:37] Q Linden: wouldn't hurt to try
* [14:37] Merov Linden: well, if you auto scale a long text, I worry about the legibility
* [14:37] Q Linden: shakes head at people who try to manually align non-fixed-width fonts
* [14:37] Squirrel Wood: Just use chinese or japanese throughout the client and you can make the UI a quarter of its current size :p
* [14:38] Robin Cornelius: yea traditional chinese, even shorter
* [14:38] Rob Linden: what do the other viewers do? how many use DejaVu Sans?
* [14:38] Robin Cornelius: good question
* [14:38] Aimee Trescothick: heck lets just make our lives easy and remove all the text
* [14:39] Q Linden: aimee, I made a product like that
* [14:39] Aimee Trescothick: ;)
* [14:39] Q Linden: turns out that people are verbal.
* [14:39] Q Linden: :)
* [14:39] Rob Linden: I'm thinking that getting this branch using DejaVu Sans is going to help everyone pool resources and get some of the spacing issues right
* [14:39] Merov Linden: it's worth a try for sure
* [14:40] Rob Linden: it'll look a little ugly at first, but I'm willing to pitch in on XUI fixups
* [14:40] Merov Linden: I've no idea how different it feels
* [14:40] Robin Cornelius: i think people use to 3rd party viewers will not even notice, but the masses on the regular viewer may be upset if layout suddenlt changes, i'm sure it will break something, but i'm all for trying DeJaVu and seeing where it goes
* [14:40] Melinda Latynina: icons and international symbols are meant to remove text. that's why we give so much attention to icons, but there's a limit to what they can do.
* [14:40] Q Linden: it will make it much harder to take patches in for UI changes
* [14:40] Techwolf Lupindo: Things really get crowded on a 1024x768 screen.
* [14:40] Q Linden: sadly, layout and content information in XUI are mixed together
* [14:41] Rob Linden: hrm
* [14:42] Rob Linden: well.....this will be another one to discuss in JIRA. I'll file it separately
* [14:42] Q Linden: didn't mean to be wet blanket :(
* [14:43] Rob Linden: let's see here.....what else is on that page....
* [14:44] Rob Linden: oh, let's talk about the easybuild stuff, since Techwolf brought it up
* [14:44] Rob Linden: has anyone had a chance to try out easybuild-2?
* [14:44] Rob Linden: 
* [14:45] Rob Linden: that's a merge of the http-texture branch and the original easybuild branch
* [14:45] Merov Linden: ashamed to admit he hasn't
* [14:45] Merov Linden: struggling already with 4 internal branches + 2 external
* [14:45] Rob Linden: yeah, it's a lot to deal with
* [14:46] Robin Cornelius: struggling keeping her *paid* work solvent ;-(
* [14:46] Rob Linden: the good news is that we might be close to a poitn where the easybuild work could merge into http-texture
* [14:46] Rob Linden: Robin: eek
* [14:46] Merov Linden: w00t!
* [14:47] Merov Linden: that was "w00t!" on the easybuild news...
* [14:47] Rob Linden: Brad @ Kitware is out this week, so some discussion about "what next" is probably better for next week
* [14:47] Robin Cornelius: gives chance for some testing
* [14:48] Rob Linden: however, it'd be good to get an assessment of whether it's ready for a merge
* [14:48] Rob Linden: I may just take another run at it myself
* [14:49] Rob Linden: ok....well, that's somethign we can discuss on list
* [14:49] Robin Cornelius: there is one tweak i would like to get in for building..
* [14:49] Rob Linden: Robin: what's that?
* [14:49] Robin Cornelius: currently building in a 32bit chroot ona 64bit system is a fight
* [14:50] Robin Cornelius: develop.py and cmake scripts all call uname which reports something 64bit and screws things
* [14:50] Robin Cornelius: so i end up with fake unames or patching scripts
* [14:51] Robin Cornelius: apart from that its a good way for me to test non-standalone builds
* [14:51] Rob Linden: hmm....
* [14:52] Rob Linden: what's the right fix for that?
* [14:52] Robin Cornelius: being able to force the arch from the command line
* [14:52] Rob Linden: oh, sure
* [14:53] Robin Cornelius: standard cross compile stuff
* [14:53] Rob Linden: that doesn't seem like it'd be a controversial change
* [14:54] Robin Cornelius: just need to work out a nice way to do it
* [14:54] Rob Linden: that seems like something a newcomer to the code could do with a little coaching
* [14:54] Rob Linden: any volunteers here?
* [14:54] Robin Cornelius: some of the easybuild changes effect this as they are tending towards a removal of develop.py
* [14:54] Robin Cornelius: so thats one less place to hack
* [14:54] Rob Linden: Robin: I see
* [14:55] Soft Linden: cmake already handles specifying an architecture on the command line, yeah?
* [14:56] Robin Cornelius: yes but it then tries to link against prebuild libs in the wrong location and the downloads are not run because 64bit is detected and unsupported (easybuild change)
* [14:56] Soft Linden: Ah yeah - CMAKE_SYSTEM_PROCESSOR and CMAKE_SYSTEM_VERSION
* [14:56] Soft Linden: gotcha.
* [14:57] Robin Cornelius: may be the folder names should be generated from those to cmake variables IF cmake works them out itsself
* [14:57] Robin Cornelius: then its transparent to override
* [14:57] Poppy Linden: I'm not familiar with the cross compile setup, sardonyx did that internally
* [14:58] Rob Linden: well, this seems worthy of another JIRA taks
* [14:58] Rob Linden: task that is
* [14:59] Robin Cornelius: running out of time here, but i wanted to mention the lack of atomic operations and threads accessing global variables
* [14:59] Twisted Laws: is there a meta-jira for all the tasks?
* [14:59] Robin Cornelius: eg https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-12775 as have seen
* [15:00] Merov Linden: yes
* [15:00] Robin Cornelius: too many if (ptr) ptr->dostuff() type operations
* [15:00] Rob Linden: Twisted: not yet
* [15:00] Robin Cornelius: and others where we just have a state, as more things are threaded its going to bite
* [15:00] Poppy Linden: there is threading work from bao and runitai, this related?
* [15:00] Merov Linden: we agreed that I'll commit a "simple" patch inspired by the one I initially wrote + Robin's study
* [15:01] Merov Linden: Poppy: yes, very much related
* [15:01] Robin Cornelius: what threads are used on windows and mac?
* [15:01] Robin Cornelius: is it native or pthread or what?
* [15:01] Poppy Linden: merov, i wasn't sure if that merged
* [15:02] Merov Linden: uses the apr thread implementation Robin
* [15:02] Merov Linden: look into llcommon/llthread
* [15:02] Robin Cornelius: ah ok, i know apr has approprate locking apis
* [15:02] Robin Cornelius: i guess they need using more ;-)
* [15:02] Merov Linden: yeap
* [15:03] Rob Linden: I've gotta run ....thanks everyone for coming
* [15:04] Merov Linden: thanks guys!
* [15:04] Robin Cornelius: bye all see you on #opensl
* [15:04] Morgaine Dinova: Thanks all, take care :-)