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

[Sean Dague]

Melanie wrote:
> 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.

So, if that's the case, and these thing are really different, and not
sent on the wire, why not make them something different in the system.
Call them "states" or something, and have their intermediate states
saved elsewhere, and only push to the asset db once they are in some
final (client retrievable) state.

Having spent a lot of time educating people on the fact that assets
can't be changed, I think we're going to introduce all manner of
confusion if that gets broken.  Much better to make a new type of object
 instead of changing something so fundemental about assets the way they
are today.

	-Sean

-- 
Sean Dague / Neas Bade
sdague at gmail.com
http://dague.net


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