[Opensim-dev] Keeping track of deployed oar files

[Justin Clark-Casey]

Christopher Yeoh wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> One problem I've been increasingly having recently is keeping
> track of what oar file has been deployed on a specific region. When users
> report bugs it would be very handy to know exactly what oar file they
> are using. Often the bug reporter is a different person from the person
> who administers the machine and doesn't have access to the console.
> 
> It would be pretty simple to create a an inworld object that has a version
> number embedded in the script that can be reported to users, but I'm pretty
> sure I'd often forget to change the version number before creating the oar file.

To be honest, I think this is going to be the best way.  Or possibly the version number could be inserted into 'about 
land' once OAR files support parcel information (which they don't yet).  If you do want to automatically insert details 
into these fields then maybe another module could do this automatically when a save oar event is received, though this 
would require some reworking of the code and a module specific mechanism in the absence of a generic one.

> 
> So I was wondering what people would think of a UTC date/timestamp being automatically 
> added to the oar files (perhaps along with the machine name) that could be loaded
> by the region when the oar file was loaded. This could then be accessed via
> an os* script call. Ideally this property would also be retained across server
> restarts. Is there a better way of doing what I want?

I have no problem with an embedded timestamp in the archive control xml, but I'm not so sure about machine name - this 
is identifying information that I wouldn't be keen about casually releasing.

The obvious place to persist this data would be in RegionInfo and the regions table.  But I'm not sure what this field 
would be called or whether it could be one that wasn't tightly tied to archive information (since the vast majority of 
regions don't come from archives).

-- 
justincc
Justin Clark-Casey
http://justincc.wordpress.com