[Opensim-dev] Why we shouldnt support Estates

[Adam Frisby]

Pardoning the slightly inflamatory subject line - allow me to clarify.

The "Estate" system as currently implemented by Linden Lab is shall we 
say ... imperfect?

Right now -- as it stands, an estate is a collection of regions under a 
common name sharing a few properties:

	* Estate Owner is shared across all regions in the estate
	* Estate Managers are shared across all regions in the estate
	* Estate Bans are shared across the estate
	* The time-of-day is shared across all regions in the estate

Frankly - I think this is mediocre at best, very limiting at worst.

For example, say you have two seperate groups of regions that want to 
share a single ban list? RBL's seem to indicate people will want to do this.

So - what's the solution? Remove abitrary groupings and make each of 
these something independently configurable, for example:

	Ban List
		Rather than have a single list shared among X regions,
		allow regions to be configured to have a remote banlist
		- some kind of URL where they can POST / GET queries
		about user status. Put this functionality into a
		BanModule-type RegionModule so it can be swapped or
		configured independently at whim.

	Estate Managers
		Similar to the above, add support in the permission
		manager for looking up the permissions of a individual 	
		user from a remote URL or address.

Now, the PermissionsModule and BanModule should respond to messages from 
the client sent by the estate tools -- but on the backend we have a much 
more configurable situation which is more suitable for large scale 
deployments.

Regards,

Adam