[Opensim-dev] Always mutable assets in OpenSim -- does it make sense?

[Mike Mazur]

Hi,

Melanie's recent thread[1] on updating assets prompted me to put in
writing some thoughts on this topic I've been having.

I'm curious whether it may be beneficial to make assets mutable. AFAIK
assets are currently immutable because of a LL decisions early on to
re-use one asset instance for very popular items sold no-modify. This
makes sense for them because they can:

* clean up unused assets since they own the entire infrastructure
(regions & DBs)
* save on space because they anticipate more identical copies rather
than slightly modified copies

Perhaps taking the opposite approach in OpenSim would be a better fit?
I mean, copying assets when they are transferred between owners, and
modifying them if they are modified in-world. I can see a few reasons
this might be beneficial:

* OpenSim's databases are distributed so cleaning them (reaping dead
assets) is more difficult
* with the advent of distributed asset servers and the long-term
vision of a wide open 3D Internet (like HyperGrid), when an item is
transferred in-world its assets should probably be stored in that
avatar's own inventory DB *anyway*
* disk is cheap, and I wonder which is more wasteful -- multiple
copies of an asset, each differing slightly due to minor edits over
time, or multiple copies of identical assets because they correspond
to different objects in-world

I see this as a cleaner approach to assets for the future. Sure,
storing duplicate identical assets in a DB can be wasteful, but this
could be alleviated with hashes of the asset or whatnot (I believe
this was brought up on this list before).

I realize this change would mean deep, possibly breaking, changes
throughout the source code, would take a long time to hash out, etc. I
thought I'd throw it out there anyway.

Your thoughts -- or perhaps clarifications on why this absolutely
cannot be done -- appreciated :)

Thanks,
Mike

[1] https://lists.berlios.de/pipermail/opensim-dev/2008-December/004025.html