SLDev-Traffic 2

sldev-traffic no 2
sldev discussions through March 9, 2007
== SCM for SLDev ==
There was discussion on the tail of an older plugin thread about the desire for LL to open their internal SCM to open source developers. Callum Lerwick offered a few links about development philosophy compatible with usual open source models:
 * http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?FrequentReleases
 * http://c2.com/xp/ContinuousIntegration.html
 * http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?CollectiveCodeOwnership
While it's not clear whether the internal servers will be exposed any time soon, in Rob Linden's Monday office hours he indicated that he was acquiring a server to run Subversion for external developers. This will facilitate external developers already working together, and it will provide a space for Lindens to collaborate with the community more effectively. There was no indication yet as to whether the external server would track the internal servers' individual changes.
== Legal Questions ==
The question of whether plugins will be able to be closed source continues. There was no definitive answer, but some time was spent trying to find support for positions for and against closed plugins in the GPL and LL's license:
http://secondlife.com/developers/opensource/flossexception
Dale Glass is writing an installer that creates a modified Second Life installation based on the original Windows installer. He asked whether his installer could directly download the installer from SecondLife.com as part of the installation process. There was no definitive answer, owing to uncertainty about restrictions that might be imposed by LL, or by the third party library providers.
In both cases, access to a general counsel would help.
== Continued OpenJPEG Problems and Coming Resolution ==
Further source releases were unusable as released for Mac and Linux owing to the OpenJPEG problem detailed in last week's SLDev-Traffic. Tofu Linden reworked the patches from VWR-123, removing one resource leak it introduced, and indicating he had pushed the result through to internal QA. In office hours Friday, Rob Linden indicated that he would shoot for a fully usable source drop before this coming Wednesday's update.
== Plugin Floater API ==
Soft Noel posted a proposed approach to offering a floater API from plugins. The interface was designed to expose a simplified C-compatible version of the floater API that didn't rely on build-time bindings. Soft Noel answered a few questions by Dale Glass and John Hurliman about the approach, but discussion has been scant.
== SMP Performance Degraded ==
David Fries noted that on his machine, the viewer was relying on a single core more heavily than it had in the past, and overall performance was somewhat degraded. Some experimentation lead to the discovery that cutting his reported graphics memory in half improved performance and multiple core use. He shared a theory about why this may be in an in-world IM, but no fixes yet.
== JIRA Triage ==
Rob Linden asked SLDev members to review open JIRA issues, verify that they were still valid, and vote for the more pressing issues. There wasn't sufficient movement to help spotlight the most pressing issues. Everyone is encouraged to log into JIRA and add comments and votes as appropriate.
One JIRA issue, MISC-37, had a good number of votes and Torley Linden noted that he was glad to see the voting system being used. Voting does get attention.
Drewan Keats noted that JIRA supports RSS for tracking issues. There are feeds for issues and comments alike, as well as tailored searches.
== SLDev-Traffic Feedback ==
This week's SLDev-Traffic is lighter as it covers a narrower time-frame than the first issue. Hopefully this is about the ongoing size, barring the occasional hot issue or major SL event. Any suggestions about how to improve the format or content of this summary would be appreciated. The positive responses are appreciated, but it's the "it would be 10x more helpful if..." responses that do me the most good. Feel free to toss me an email via soft at softnoel dot ORanGutan or message Soft Noel in-world.