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

[Latha Serevi]

One simple and tempting approach is to make the firm declarations:
Mutable objects must live in a sim, and all sim objects are mutable. 
Immutable objects live in asset servers, and all assets are immutable.

This is more or less what we expect to happen, and it has huge
advantages; but we end up having a lot of explicit updater
scripts, and a lot of out-of-date objects whose creators didn't
plan ahead with an updater script or whose owners haven't
rezzed them lately.

Can we imagine a next-simplest approach where certain assets
are mutable?  Perhaps a single level of indirection, with an asset
type that is a mutable reference to an immutable asset?   Or some
kind of update mechanism that can be explicitly invoked on assets?

Advantage:  you can examine a up-to-date schedule for your favorite
coffeehouse by examining a mutable notecard in inventory, rather than
visiting a sim or wearing a schedule HUD.  Disadvantage: the possibility
that your mutable T-shirt-of-the-week leaves you naked, or that
the (unwisely mutable) bricks of your house change size.

This is a meaty conceptual challenge.  If we don't address it at all,
we'll be putting a lot of our mutable info onto web pages. 
Is that what we want?


Latha