[Opensim-dev] users and agents table, and other oddities?

[Tleiades]

> But yeah I think there is a lot of confusion about the UserAgent thing in 
> the user server. I know I got a bit confused about that just last week. It 
> seems that the UserAgent in there is really more of a UserSession, ie a 
> new UserAgent is created every time the user logs in.

Let me try to come up with a few definitions of terms, which doesn't require 
a lot of refactoring:

Sim/Simulator: a program which runs a simulation of objects interacting, 
possibly with the involvement of simulated physics.

Region: a 256x256 wide area, having a terrain and a number of objects, 
interacting

A Sim can house multiple regions, and each region can house multiple objects

An object can either be a collection of prims or an avatar

User: This represents a person in the real world, somthing which has an 
email, a username etc.

Viewer: an application which is used to view the state of the simulation. 
Currently I know of three, the LL viewer, the OpenSL test client and 
AjaxLife

Agent: in a way, this can be thought of as a cursor, indicating what 
position inside the simulator, the viewer is observing from., typically a 
viewer will have multiple agents, a primary, often backed by an avatar, and 
multiple child agents, in the neighboring regions.

Session: Each connection between a viewer and an agent, regardless if the 
agent is the primary or one of the child agents. Personally I would prefer 
that we named child agents as sub-agents, and the sessions between the 
viewer and sub-agents as sub-sessions.

Unless somebody strongly objects to this convetion, I will start using that 
naming convention in my codewriting.

> One thing that we have repeatedly said is that we need to rewrite all the 
> backend servers (ie user server etc) as the current ones are the result of 
> very early work, from before we really knew how a lot of things worked or 
> would work. One of the goals of 0.5 is meant to be that rewrite of the 
> servers and the protocol between them and the regions.

won't that hurt the goal of "frequent releases" ?
/tleiades