[Opensim-dev] User services refactoring status

[Mic Bowman]

The comment below about ad-nauseum discussions is at least a
mis-representation and borders on silly. This isn't an "either/or"
situation. You can have discipline, documentation, and well thought out
interfaces *AND* make rapid progress.

OpenSim development has chosen a more-than-usual "anarchist" process
(anarchist is the word I've heard core developers use to describe
themselves)... and that's a very reasonable choice for this project (and a
choice that is clearly communicated). Its an approach that leads to rapid
innovation and (to put it mildly) passionate energy in the coding.

It also has other consequences... For example, it alienates the "user"
community who would like to take the code, use it and extend it. Yes.. you
can claim that we're all too early. That we should wait for 1.0. Until then,
for all its claims to extensibility, the cost of maintaining extensions
against a shifting-sand set of interfaces is very high... that is, the
development process that has been chosen for OpenSim works against the basic
goals of the project.

The normal response to this kind of message is "get in and fix it". And I
completely agree. And we have (financial support, code, marketing, etc).
And... the question we continue to ask ourselves is whether our (meaning
Intel) dev resources would be better focused on work specific to our
customers & collaborators on a release we choose to "freeze" or whether we
should continue to wait for and work towards 1.0.

Please note that I'm not suggesting that OpenSim core development change (or
we would lose all the benefits of the process)... I'm simply saying that the
current development process forces us as users to decide when the platform
has reached an appropriate level of functionality and to focus our resources
on that version.

--mic

On Wed, Jan 6, 2010 at 8:10 AM, <diva at metaverseink.com> wrote:

> In most systems, the network protocols are fixed. People go to great
> lengths discussing them ad-nauseum in meetings and committees, to settle
> on the right data formats, the right data, etc. NOT HERE. The network
> protocols in OpenSim are now dynamically loaded, and therefore
> replaceable. There is no such thing as *the* network protocol between
> the simulator and, say, the asset server. There can be many -- you can
> roll your own. There are reference implementations in the core
> distribution, but that's exactly what they are: reference
> implementations, they are not fixed protocols. As such, people should be
> careful about relying on those reference implementations.
>
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