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

[Lc]

the "disk is cheap" argument is not true. Most of the actual grids I know
rent their servers from various datacenter. Upgrading the HW to have a
bigger capacity could increase quickly their monthly fees and it's not
because it's cheap we must wast the ressource IMO
SM

On Sun, Dec 14, 2008 at 6:48 AM, Mike Mazur <mmazur at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
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