[Opensim-dev] Perl vs C# UGAI?

[Justin Clark-Casey]

I'm very much in favour of the idea of alternative implementations of 
the UGAI protocols.

As James, has suggested, in other circumstances it would be good to 
formally write down the protocol and advertise and discuss changes 
beforehand.  However, the problem is, as Michael and Sean say, is that 
it's still in a state of considerable flux (this is Alpha code!). Trying 
to formalize at this stage would considerably slow down development.

I have to agree with Michael that we shouldn't have alternative 
implementations in our own svn tree - it will cause considerable 
confusion as to what OpenSim officially supports and what it doesn't.  
And hypothetically, if Lulurun goes away for whatever reason 
(hypothetically!) the onus to maintain it as an 'official' alternative 
would fall on the OpenSim developers.  Whether the Perl alternative 
should really be the reference (not necessarily the best) implementation 
is another argument, I think.  I can see pros and cons for both.

Having said that, it sounds like Lulurun is willing to maintain the code 
to match changes in the protocol.  Even if the code doesn't live inside 
the OpenSim tree, I believe we could make an effort on an informal basis 
to advertise and discuss proposed protocol changes before the fact 
(unless the changes are very large, in which case things would have to 
be done post-facto).

As an example of the flux, I'm going to fess up now that I recently 
changed the protocol slightly myself.  Instead of returning only the 
root inventory folders, the request root folders inventory rest request 
now returns *all* the folders (it wasn't renamed due to other 
difficulties).  I'm not sure if Lulurun covers this yet (though the old 
state of affairs will not cause anything extra to break).

--
justincc


Michael Wright wrote:
> One problem with having two sets of UGAI is that it makes changes 
> harder to do. As I'm not really a perl programmer, if I was going to 
> doing a change to something in the grid servers or the protocol. It 
> would mean I either had to change the perl ones too or break those. 
> And as they are in our svn, we would most likely getting people 
> complaining they are broke. And this is a big factor in my mind as 
> over the next few weeks there is a chance that I will be able to do 
> some work on the grid servers/protocols.
>
>  I'm with Stefan on this one, in that I'm all for there being 
> different implementations of the UGAI's but think for now we should 
> only have one in the svn other wise it is just going to lead to 
> confusion/problems if one implementation is broke because of some 
> change to the other. So think other implementations should be outside 
> the svn.
>
> We do understand that not everyone wants to use the standard c# 
> versions (and to be fair, who would? with the general state they are 
> in). Thats why we (myself and Stefan) have wrote our own ASP version 
> of some of the backend servers, but we haven't added them to the svn 
> for the reasons I gave above. In that not everyone would want to run 
> ASP servers, so we think at this time at least there should only be 
> one version in svn. So that people aren't affraid to do changes in 
> them, like they could be if they knew that there was other versions in 
> svn that they were breaking by doing those changes.
>
> */Stefan Andersson <stefan at tribalmedia.se>/* wrote:
>
>     Simple and straight answer: "No."
>      
>     Also, the whole 'share' dir should be externalized into some other
>     repository, or just a (set of) downloadable tarball(s) on the
>     wiki, ASAP
>      
>     /Stefan
>
>
>
>         ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>         Date: Wed, 2 Apr 2008 20:02:52 -0700
>         From: cfk at pacbell.net
>         To: opensim-dev at lists.berlios.de
>         Subject: [Opensim-dev] Perl vs C# UGAI?
>
>         I am really puzzled about this new Perl UGAI and it leads to a
>         number of questions:
>
>         Are we going to have two sets of servers for grid mode? One
>         written in C# and the other written in Perl?
>
>         Will we have each of them with the same features? Will we
>         abandon the C# UGAI servers?
>
>         How will we seperate out issues between regions on a grid and
>         the grid servers if some grids run with Perl UGAI and some run
>         with C# UGAI?
>
>         Charles
>
>
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