[Opensim-dev] Updating assets, revisited

[Melanie]

Hello,

after letting various ideas pass before my inner eye, developing a 
few concepts and doing a lot of thinking, I come to the conclusion 
that assets should, in one special case, be updatable.

That case is attachment editing, where, if we saved the state every 
few seconds, as we should, we would be creating obscene amounts of 
assets.

Saving attachments on logout is not feasible, the thread context 
doesn't live long enough to handle this, so attachments are not 
saved on logout. Currently, the only way to save an edited 
attachment is to take it off explicitly, then put it back on. If you 
are making attachments, you sometimes need to work on the avatar to 
make things fit right. Crashing in the middle of that would lose 
what is potentially an hour of work.

This is where it think updatable assets make sense. A flag, similar 
to the "slam" bit, can be set when an item is given, or put into an 
object. It would be reset when a new asset is creted by a 
conventional save. In this case, it is guaranteed that the asset is 
not shared when the flag is clear (it would be set in freshly 
received items). In that situation, asset updating would not impact 
any other instances of the object as an inventory item and can be 
considered safe. Allowing this asset update would finally let us 
handle attachment editing/saving in a reasonable manner.

Thoughts, please?

Melanie