[Opensim-dev] Concerning recent grid instability and inconsistency

[James Stallings II]

I'm glad to see I'm getting some response to this, it's quite encouraging!

That said, I have to ask for all of your indulgence; as you're all aware, I
haven't been around the project for near as long as most of you, and know
much less about how things have been done, by who, and why.

What I do see that causes me to write things like the original post, is that
we are all embedded in this sort of defacto organic process that is
admittedly producing profound results, but that on occasion has us making
mistakes that are, in a more directed effort, outpaced with a bit of
planning.

Dont get me wrong ;) I have no interest in seeing some big highly
articulated roadmap, it would be stale before it could be edited up and
posted. Nor the sort of monolithic top-down control that would be required
to produce and implement such.

However, I *do* think we need to try to adapt effectively in some way to
some of the circumstances that arise from our somewhat undirected workflow
as developers and testers.

My #1 concern as I tried to raise awareness on some of these occurrences (my
apologies for being so coarsely informed about some of the deeper details of
grid communications) was to draw attention to the possibility that a lot of
the bug hunting we were doing was perhaps misguided, and the result of
providing completely uncontrolled access to the osgrid infrastructure to
potential region operators. To be clear, I do not have philosophical issues
with this wrt osgrid, indeed, I am very much in favor of letting everyone
connect up who wants to - with a few very specific and definable exceptions:

1> the pathologically misconfigured
2> the pathologically ignorant

The former we can address in a variety of ways - tools are the key.
The latter, not so much. But if we take care of #1, it pretty much covers #2
as well.

MW, I'm sorry if I gave you the wrong impression about getting commitments
and producing new work on the 'packet handling code' (a label I'm already
regretting my use of ;)  Of course many have contributed to it and no one
'owns' it. I think what I was after there was to try and form up a concerted
effort to revisit the work thats been done, in the interest of freshening it
up and ensuring that no opportunities had been missed to make it more stable
and/or efficient. Any such effort is necesarily informal, but I think it
would be far more effective if all concerned agree in advance that its an
effort worthy of undertaking. Also, I don't think I envisioned compelling
anything of anyone, so much as getting confirmation they were either
(dis)interested/just had other things to do or, prepared to come focus
together with us on this specific area of endeavor. Sure it is *possible*
for anyone to just dive in and start working on the code; but it isn't
*practical*, per se.

Thanks so much for taking the time to read my spiel and contribute your
thoughts. I have every confidence that mere awareness of these concerns will
have a profound impact on what happens afterwards :)


Cheers!
James
:D


-- 
===================================
The wind
scours the earth for prayers
The night obscures them
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