[Opensim-dev] Development models (was Re: The essence of "grid")

[Mike Dickson]

Justin, thanks for clarifying the process. And I certainly understand
the interest in Hypergrid and the energy behind it. Charles your message
was also helpful in highlighting to me what is at the center of my
concern.  I agree the development process is somewhat chaotic and things
get hacked in based on interest.  That's probably completely to be
expected though it may not make for the best platform going forward.

Using Hypergrid as an example,my preference would be to do it outside of
core. So let me explain that.  Something like Hypergrid is going to
require a different usage model from the original core (different
protocols for "teleporting", now the exploration around inventory, etc).
Rather than have the changes to handle that get introduced into core I'd
have preferred to see something like an RFC that documents what is being
proposed, and what "interfaces" need to be changed in order to
accommodate the new use cases.  That RFC gets iterated and the
interfaces evolved to make "hypergrid" possible as a pluggable module.
Over time most likely the set of commonly used modules grows and you
ultimately end up with a core framework and a "core" set of modules that
define what the out of the box functionality of an installation is
(standalone, hypergrid, what have you).

The obvious problem with this approach is that it requires evolving the
core framework which is not nearly as "sexy" as hacking in new features.
I've done both approaches.  Certainly a cool demo can go a long way to
sell a concept and often the change the framework process takes enough
time that prototypes don't happen. It's more work to maintain a branched
copy of core while you evolve your prototype into a set of changed
interfaces that support it.  Personally I believe that more disciplined
approach is the key to seeing OpenSim get to 1.0. And ultimately be a
better platform for experimentation.

So I like the concept of hypergrid.  I think prototypes like that need
to exist if only to prove that the community is healthy. But I also
believe that how the "framework" is defined and evolves is equally if
not more important (to me at least). 

Just my 2 cents.

Mike

On Fri, 2009-04-17 at 15:35 +0000, Justin Clark-Casey wrote:
> But I do have to also point out that OpenSim development is largely driven by the interest of the developers (since 
> there's no single company behind it).  If there's a lot of development interest behind Hypergrid then this is the 
> direction that's inevitably going to progress most.  If people coming along contributing code that enhances different 
> architectures, then development will also be driven in that direction.