[Opensim-dev] future rexviewer merger

Sun Dec 7 12:41:07 UTC 2008

Communication is a good thing Toni, and you have done a fair enough job of
it here.

Clearly there are some cultural (think national, not corporate) differences
here. You have laid out in bold relief many of the reasons behind the things
that have frustrated me about the rexx project.

One thing I am always harping on with my employer is the notion of managing
expectations. Typically I am talking in a sales context, but I'll say it
here: management of expectations is everything! and of course, communication
is key to effective management of expectations.

IMNSHO, this is the 'big fail' on rexx's part - they were oft invited to
drop in and discuss things on IRC or participate in the mailing lists. I
dont think anyone really expected them to be there chatting in IRC
everytime, but they could have been following and commenting on key work
there and in the lists as well, and commenting about things that may have
impacted their work, whether in a positive or negative way. While it may
seem we burn a lot of time in IRC goofing off, this is generally users or
opensim devs that are finished with dev for a time socializing. Nothing
wrong with that, we are a community, and communities interact at many
levels. No particular commitment to such trivialities is needful from the
genuinely busy - opensim devs are all business when working hard, and dont
involve themselves very deeply in the lighter side of the community (if at
all) at such times. As a result of this mode of working, oportunities to
avoid duplicated effort were missed, and directions were taken that are not
consonant with the general direction of the broader community, leaving as
much work to get re-integrated post-fork, as it were, as perhaps was done to
demonstrate a proof of concept in the first place. Additionally, such
communications as we did have were typically in response to complaints about
the cross platform issues, and we were continually reassured the commitment
was there, in spite of over a year of work and still not a single line of
rexx code that will run on any of the alternate platforms. It simply appears
as a result of this that there is anything but a commitment to our
cross-platform ideals. Worse, it seems to suggest that rexx's commitments
are not to be trusted.

Now, as I am an equal opportunity offender, it is time for me to level my
critical eye on the opensim team too. You see, they have contributed to this
mess in a subtle way, through a slavish adherence to an old toolchain: SVN
*simply does not do as good a job of supporting collaboration as modern
tools like Hg and GIT*. Hg is probably to be preferred over GIT as I believe
Hg works cross-platform - but the key point is, these more modern repository
management toolchains would have offered rexx the flexibility to both do
'clean room' work outside and parallel to the broader community, and
facilitated a much smoother integration of their clean-room work post-fork.
Indeed, these tools facillitate this asynch workflow so thoroughly that the
term 'fork' really loses most of it's meaning.

Enough of hindsight. Time to move forward, with lessons learned. Ryan seems
very commited personally to correcting such of these misteps as are perhaps
of chief concern; I dont want to be offensive and suggest he isnt sincere,
because at this juncture that is all I would be doing is offending, and that
is honestly not my goal.

It is clear from the 38 messages plus in this and related side threads that
rexx is getting the message about communication - and I will say it again
just to reenforce the notion: to be a part of the community, one must
communicate with one's peers.

I *wish* I could say that OpenSim's core dev team is getting the message
about the toolchains - this is something that hobbles many innovators. Some
have quietly adopted these newer toolchains for themselves, but much of the
benefits of this are lost because core still sits in an SVN repo (yes, I am
aware that Hg and GIT can work with SVN repos, but to do things this way
rather dilutes their strengths).

Oh well, one thing about us human beings is, we learn, grow, adapt. I dont
think anyone in this community of ours is less than intelligent (or less
than human for that matter ;) and I hold out hope that the OpenSim team will
see how remaining bound to SVN is holding us back.

Coming to this point in this discussion I am hopefull and optimistic that
good things are going to come out of this, in spite of the pain. C'mon,
Ryan, I cant *wait* another year to see this stuff ;)

Cheers
James

On Sun, Dec 7, 2008 at 2:03 AM, Melanie <melanie at t-data.com> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> Toni Alatalo wrote:
> > yep like i mentioned in the previous post they are orthogonal and
> > should be separate. was thinking of that earlier this week but didn't
> > have time to bring up with the Rex people yet.
>
> That sounds good.
>
> Melanie
> _______________________________________________
> Opensim-dev mailing list
> Opensim-dev at lists.berlios.de
> https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/opensim-dev
>

-- 
===================================
The wind
scours the earth for prayers
The night obscures them

http://osgrid.org
http://del.icio.us/SPQR
http://twitter.com/jstallings2
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/5/770/a49
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://opensimulator.org/pipermail/opensim-dev/attachments/20081207/b4692e70/attachment-0001.html>