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

[Melanie]

Hi,

the assets that we need to update are not assets that are sent to 
the client. There is no reasonable way to update texture, animation, 
or sound assets. Those are sent to the client and cached there. 
However, it is possible to update prim and script assets, since the 
client never sees them. On scripts, this makes little sense, unless 
the "implicitly shared" approach is dropped. But introducing script 
state in inventory will make immutable assets practical there again.
The only asset that needs updating is a prim assets, and that only 
needs to be updated, and is only safe to update, when editing 
attachments.
Solving the thread lifetime (not easy!) still doesn't solve the 
issue, which is a crash in the middle of editing. Massive amounts of 
work could be lost, so a means to save periodically is needed, and 
mutable prim assets are the only place where this can be sensibly done.
 From my end, this is _not_ a proposal to move to generally treating 
assets as mutable, merely a proposal to allow it in one special case 
which could not be solved in another reasonable way.

Melanie


Sean Dague wrote:
> Mike Mazur 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
> 
> I think you are discounting getting the asset to the client.  This isn't
> just an issue of things we can change.  If you update an asset, any
> clients out there with that asset id already won't see the changes using
> any of the current full featured clients.
> 
> 	-Sean
> 
> 
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Opensim-dev mailing list
> Opensim-dev at lists.berlios.de
> https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/opensim-dev