Open Source Meeting/2009-01-15

== Agenda ==
No posted agenda
== Transcript ==
* [14:01] Aimee Trescothick: lo :)
* [14:01] Soft Linden: Hey hey
* [14:01] Kirsten Frog: Hello
* [14:02] Rob Linden: hiya
* [14:02] Latif Khalifa: barely made it
* [14:02] Carjay McGinnis: greetings
* [14:02] Latif Khalifa: my home region seems to have been cut off from the rest of the grid
* [14:02] Rob Linden: Agenda: https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Open_Source_Meeting/Agenda
* [14:03] Rob Linden: welcome all. transcript will (eventually) be posted on the wiki, so bear that in mind as you type
* [14:03] Rob Linden: getting started....
* [14:03] Aimee Trescothick: packed agenda then :D
* [14:03] Rob Linden: heh....
* [14:04] Rob Linden: anything want to bring anything up now, or should the Lindens give their updates?
* [14:05] Rob Linden: my update: we continue to work on QtWebkit integration with Torch Mobile
* [14:06] Rob Linden: those of you who follow these things probably noticed the licensing change from Nokia on Qt (and thus QtWebkit)
* [14:06] Morgaine Dinova: Yeah
* [14:07] Aimee Trescothick: nods
* [14:07] Soft Linden: Are we definitely doing QtWebkit at this point, not just webkit?
* [14:07] Rob Linden: nothing is definite until we have things working better than our existing stuff, but the Qt part of it helps greatly
* [14:08] Rob Linden: (where "existing stuff" is Mozilla)
* [14:08] Robin Cornelius: from a maintainance point of view it can't be much worse that mozilla
* [14:08] Saijanai Kuhn: there's that RSS exploit in webkit to worry about though
* [14:09] Rob Linden: we're not at a point where we need to worry too much about the exploits, so long as we're using the latest (fixed) stuff
* [14:09] Saijanai Kuhn: well, this was just announced yesterday, I thought.
* [14:09] Rob Linden: ...and I've gotta believe that the RSS exploit is specifically a Safari thing and not a WebKit thing generally
* [14:10] Saijanai Kuhn: dunno for sure. Says safari in one place, webkit in another. Shrugs
* [14:11] Rob Linden: hmm...well, we have an install base of very close to zero, so that's why I'm shrugging it off
* [14:12] Saijanai Kuhn: good point ;-)
* [14:12] Rob Linden: anyway, hopefully we'll be able to change that as we get this stuff production ready
* [14:13] Robin Cornelius: i've got functional debian packages ready
* [14:13] Rob Linden: huzzah!
* [14:13] Rob Linden: well, maybe we'll actually have something to worry about exploitwise then :)
* [14:13] Robin Cornelius: with any luck the debian guys will apply the security team effort to qt#s wekbit anyway in my case
* [14:14] Rob Linden: Robin: you're using stock QtWebkit as shipped with Debian, right?
* [14:14] Robin Cornelius: oh yea
* [14:14] Robin Cornelius: with the llmozlib build as a shared library, so it was a hot swap job
* [14:15] Rob Linden: how is QtWebkit working for you in viewer?
* [14:15] Robin Cornelius: background colour issues
* [14:15] Robin Cornelius: but mostly prety good
* [14:15] Rob Linden: any sense of performance difference?
* [14:15] Robin Cornelius: seems better
* [14:16] Robin Cornelius: clicking links is more responsive
* [14:16] Robin Cornelius: very subjective though, no real testing
* [14:16] Rob Linden: yeah, understood. I'm not sure what metrics we'll be applying. framerate always comes up as one
* [14:17] Robin Cornelius: well currently the pumping is sub optimal
* [14:17] Rob Linden: ah, right
* [14:17] Robin Cornelius: but as you know its a work in progress
* [14:17] Rob Linden: yeah, I'm pretty optimistic that this will shape up pretty quickly
* [14:17] Robin Cornelius: its appearing that the install size even with qt hanging on is comparable to the current mozlib with mozilla so thats not bad and its hoped it can be stripped further
* [14:19] Robin Cornelius: building on windows sill seems a little fun though
* [14:19] Rob Linden: as of right now, we're pretty much using the llmozlib interface almost unmodified. I imagine as we make the right hooks for Qt/Webkit, we'll smooth off the rough edges
* [14:19] Rob Linden: heh...windows build
* [14:19] Robin Cornelius: its link hell
* [14:19] Rob Linden: yeah, that's the big obstacle right now
* [14:19] Aimee Trescothick: anyone tried it on osx yet? :D
* [14:19] Robin Cornelius: not that i know of but the qmake rules have mac branches
* [14:20] Robin Cornelius: probably just needs some testing
* [14:20] Aimee Trescothick: mm, might have a look over the weekend if I find some time then
* [14:20] Robin Cornelius: yea the git is being updated regulary
* [14:21] Robin Cornelius: heh there is some nice animation bug here, Robs developed a nervous twitch
* [14:21] Rob Linden: ?
* [14:21] Robin Cornelius: when you are idle you are shaking
* [14:22] Rob Linden: hmm...I'm not seeing that. I wonder if it's a local thing
* [14:22] Aimee Trescothick: that sounds like what happens if your clock goes out of sync for some reason while the client is running
* [14:22] Aimee Trescothick: clock was out and just got corrected maybe?
* [14:23] Robin Cornelius: no idea, moved the camera and it stopped
* [14:23] Aimee Trescothick: probably not that then
* [14:23] Rob Linden: oh well. anyway, any questions about the QtWebkit stuff?
* [14:23] Robin Cornelius: just add that it builds out of the box on debian testing and above (well it did for me)
* [14:24] Geneko Nemeth: Hmm...
* [14:24] Latif Khalifa: Robin, I am seeing that and other camer weirdness in the latest 1.22 build
* [14:24] Thickbrick Sleaford: hmm, Aimee, now that you mention it, I see a 50 seconds lag between machine and the SL time. never seen it before.
* [14:24] Thickbrick Sleaford: * my machine
* [14:24] Geneko Nemeth: Why use QtWebKit and not just WebKit?
* [14:25] Rob Linden: Geneko: there's a number of things that Webkit alone doesn't provide without help from some other layer
* [14:25] Rob Linden: on Safari, there's a bunch of Webcore stuff
* [14:25] Rob Linden: with Google Chrome, they added Skia
* [14:25] Robin Cornelius: yea webkit is always ported to a platform QT/Gtk/Windows etc i guess it could be done but no ones yet done it so its massive work
* [14:26] Rob Linden: we could do a "native" port that would use the Second Life viewer's XUI controls, but that's a very large amount of work
* [14:27] Geneko Nemeth: And would probably have to wait for XUI cleanup...
* [14:27] Rob Linden: we evaluated Skia as an option earlier, but it just wasn't *quite* ready
* [14:28] Geneko Nemeth: What about Cairo?.
* [14:28] Rob Linden: it was (and remains) an appealing option for a number of reasons, but QtWebkit is much more mature
* [14:29] Rob Linden: Geneko: the only Cairo-based option that I'm aware of is GtkWebkit
* [14:29] Robin Cornelius: does that fully support off screen rendering yet?
* [14:30] Rob Linden: we did look at GtkWebkit early on, as well, and it wasn't far enough along either
* [14:30] Saijanai Kuhn: would Qt become the new GUI framework for the client at some point?
* [14:30] Robin Cornelius: Qt supports offscreen, but Gtk and its Cairo surfaces are behind on that feature
* [14:30] Rob Linden: Saijanai: not entirely out of the question, but not on the table right now
* [14:31] Rob Linden: right now, the UI is pretty bound up in the guts of the viewer
* [14:31] Rob Linden: we're teasing it apart now, but....
* [14:31] Saijanai Kuhn: knows :-/
* [14:31] Robin Cornelius: do you mean the platform specific UI or the OpenGL GUI?
* [14:31] Rob Linden: ...we need to be done with that exercise before we even have the option of considering other GUI kits
* [14:32] Geneko Nemeth: Aww, no Mozilla XUL based viewer UIs then...
* [14:32] Saijanai Kuhn: There's not a diff as far as I know, in the viewer
* [14:32] Geneko Nemeth: the LL XUI
* [14:32] Robin Cornelius: the viewer does use native UI stuff for file pickers Gtk on linux and a couple of other things
* [14:32] Geneko Nemeth: I works with it in translating.
* [14:32] Saijanai Kuhn: ah, OK, didn't know that
* [14:33] Rob Linden: yeah.....as far as changing the few little bits of UI where we use Gtk, that's a good question for Tofu
* [14:33] Saijanai Kuhn: though, Mac native file picker is also used, so silly me
* [14:35] Aimee Trescothick: ooh, k, that's spooky, we all just spontaneously turned into ruth clouds
* [14:35] Rob Linden: basically, we use native UI in some places, where "native" on Linux is Gtk
* [14:36] Rob Linden: anything else on this topic?
* [14:36] Thickbrick Sleaford: somwhat relate, are there any plans to use something liek pango for the text rendering?
* [14:37] Robin Cornelius: Alissa was playing with that
* [14:37] Rob Linden: Thickbrick: (what Robin said)
* [14:37] Robin Cornelius: thinks there is performance hit
* [14:37] Rob Linden: there's a somewhat patchy patch for that in JIRA
* [14:37] Thickbrick Sleaford: bidirectional text will be nice...
* [14:37] Rob Linden: I know there's some renewed interest in that of late inside Linden Lab
* [14:38] Rob Linden: ....but I don't know just how seriously we're thinking about heading that direction now
* [14:38] Soft Linden: I haven't seen any development work toward it. That or something like it will sure be needed if we extend the language support into the middle east, etc
* [14:39] Geneko Nemeth: Something probably nobody would care: Qt Applications are regarded by Windows as" tablet Aware" even if it doesn't use that data.
* [14:39] Soft Linden: Does it buy a lot over the current solutions for Asian languages?
* [14:39] Geneko Nemeth: current solutions for Asian languages? Do you (we) have one?
* [14:40] Rob Linden: we know we need to do better on non-English languages, and we either have to get serious about supporting good RTL, or support some tech that does the work for us
* [14:40] Rob Linden: (and other i18n issues)
* [14:40] Nyx Linden: we have japanese chinese, and korean support in the client currently
* [14:40] Geneko Nemeth: As far as I know, Chinese / Japanese line wrapping is handled as English.
* [14:42] Soft Linden: Aimee's doing an expose on the Skull and Fog society.
* [14:42] Thickbrick Sleaford: heh
* [14:42] Aimee Trescothick: ;)
* [14:43] Rob Linden: heh...that's a nice look
* [14:43] Rob Linden: hrmph
* [14:43] Soft Linden: Fixed.
* [14:44] Morgaine Dinova: chuckles
* [14:44] Rob Linden: in other news....the response period for RFP for VWR-11114 is closed now....we're pretty happy with the responses we've gotten so far.
* [14:45] Rob Linden: not much more to report there, other than it's moving forward
* [14:46] Rob Linden: that's all I have to report. Soft or Nyx...got anything to say about what you're working on?
* [14:46] Soft Linden: I've been working on decidedly non-Open Source work this week, afraid. Nothing here.
* [14:47] Nyx Linden: just some avatar tweaks as of late, won't see the light of day until 1.23
* [14:47] Geneko Nemeth: Whet kind of tweaks?
* [14:47] Morgaine Dinova: And very interesting they were, from yesterday's meeting :-)
* [14:47] Aimee Trescothick: very
* [14:47] Nyx Linden: to start with, sending less textures
* [14:48] Nyx Linden: and a few other code cleanup tweaks
* [14:49] Morgaine Dinova: Would it be the right time to ask a short question about that?
* [14:49] Rob Linden: go for it
* [14:51] Aimee Trescothick: :D
* [14:51] Morgaine Dinova: Thinking about your plan Nyx, I was wondering whether the rez time for all avatar textures is not going to be given by the slowest link in the chain, the client + bake upload latency time. Since the actual textures are not being downloaded to clients anymore (except their own), everyone else will be dependent on the people's own upload speeds.
* [14:51] Aimee Trescothick: (oops, wrong window, not just a random involuntary laugh:)
* [14:51] Morgaine Dinova: Ie. a lot of clouds
* [14:52] Nyx Linden: only when people change their appearance - walking around your baked textures should be served directly from the sim
* [14:52] Aimee Trescothick: isn't that how it works now anyway?
* [14:52] Robin Cornelius: yes the bakes are cached
* [14:52] Aimee Trescothick: yeah
* [14:53] Nyx Linden: the bake & upload speeds will only be a factor when you have to rebake, at which point others in the area will see the old baked textures until the new ones are uploaded
* [14:53] Morgaine Dinova: But current the textures are sent down to all, which is why the clothing creators don't like it much.
* [14:53] Morgaine Dinova: And that's going to stop, I believe.
* [14:54] Robin Cornelius: ah more baking?
* [14:54] Latif Khalifa: so fallback on client side baking is being removed from the viewer?
* [14:54] Aimee Trescothick: as I understood it from yesterday, it uses local baking of other people as a fallback if it can't get the baked texture for some reason, any metric on how often that happens at the moment?
* [14:55] Robin Cornelius: haha
* [14:55] Aimee Trescothick: ;)
* [14:55] Robin Cornelius: every camping bot
* [14:55] Nyx Linden: technically not immediately, for backwards compatibility reasons (have to send out component textures for older clients), but the new client won't download component textures it receives UUIDs for
* [14:55] Aimee Trescothick: that's what I was thinking Robin
* [14:56] Latif Khalifa: makes sense... except it will make it longer between someone changing their appearance and everybody else seeing that change
* [14:56] Morgaine Dinova: In which case it can't do its own baking, and hence everyone has to wait for everyone else's client to upload theres. It adds latency.
* [14:56] Nyx Linden: correct, you won't see live updates as people edit their appearance, until they hit the "save" or "ok" button
* [14:56] Aimee Trescothick: but only on something that happens relatively rarely
* [14:57] Aimee Trescothick: the other benefits are probably worth it
* [14:57] Latif Khalifa: Aimee, strippers will disagre :D
* [14:57] Aimee Trescothick: well, relatively rarely unless
* [14:57] Nyx Linden: on the other hand you only have to download 6 textures instead of >20
* [14:57] Aimee Trescothick: yeah was just going to say that lol
* [14:57] Latif Khalifa: hahaha
* [14:58] Aimee Trescothick: yeah, so the reduction in other traffic is worth it, along with the fact it then gives you freedom to do whatever you like to produce the baked texture
* [14:58] Nyx Linden: baking itself is fairly quick, even uploading doesn't take long. Longest part of the process is getting full res versions of the component textures on a new outfit
* [14:59] Rob Linden: well, I've got another thing after this, and I'm sure others do too (there a UX meeting next, iirc)
* [14:59] Robin Cornelius: they could/should be priority boosted
* [14:59] Morgaine Dinova: Oh yes, UXIG time.
* [14:59] Nyx Linden: that's on my todo list :)
* [14:59] Rob Linden: anything else before the official end time? (feel free to carry on unofficially)
* [14:59] Aimee Trescothick: local wardrobe :)
* [15:00] Rob Linden: alright, thanks everyone!
* [15:00] Morgaine Dinova: Thanks Rob, et ales
* [15:00] Rob Linden: scurries off
* [15:00] Robin Cornelius: Later
* [15:00] Aimee Trescothick: thanks rob :)
* [15:00] Rob Linden: bye!
* [15:00] Morgaine Dinova: waves and heads to UXIG
Category:Open Source Meeting