[Opensim-dev] Proposal to eliminate the name, description and invType fields from the assets db table

[Melanie]

Yes. Assets are never given. The are always shared. You pass around 
references, and permissions, names, descriptions, etc, apply to 
those references only.
The viewer employs a transaction system to keep you from creating 
references to arbitrary assets. If you could, you'd have a copy.

Assets are immutable and implicitly shared. Any copy of an item 
shares the asset with it's original.

Texture, animation and sound are immutable items. There are no 
changeable parts to the asset. All others get copied only when 
changed (copy-on-write).

So, at any given time, any asset can be referenced by any number of 
people.
That is also the reason why no asset table cleanup is possible. You 
just don't know if something is referenced. It's not just user 
inventories, but also prim inventories and textures on prims, as 
well as references to textures and sounds by UUID in scripts.

So, asset naming is really a nonsense operation.

Melanie


Mike Mazur wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Mon, 23 Jun 2008 09:17:20 +0100
> Melanie <melanie at t-data.com> wrote:
> 
>> no. Assets are shared. If I give you an item, both items will refer 
>> to the same asset. Who will have the right to rename?
> 
> OK, let's see if I can understand this.
> 
> If you give me an item, how many items are there? I assume if you give
> me an item it's removed from your inventory and placed into mine. There
> is only one reference to the asset.
> 
> If you copy the item and give me a copy, what happens? The reference is
> copied, while the asset is not? In that case we have two references,
> both referring to the same asset as you say.
> 
> I guess if you copy an item and give me the copy, a new copy of the
> asset is _not_ made because that would clutter up the DB with possibly
> thousands of identical assets?
> 
> Thanks!
> Mike
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