[Opensim-dev] Roadmap To Beta

[Justin Clark-Casey]

Hi Akira,

Thanks for taking the time to write about this.  I'm going to address the alpha/beta question here.  The sit position 
change I'm going to address in a new mailing list thread - I do want to talk about it.

 From a personal point of view, I do have a rough list of criteria in my head that would have to be met for me to 
consider OpenSimulator to be beta, and it may well be helpful to post these on the wiki.  This covers much more ground 
than simply the status of things in the feature matrix.

This would not constitute a road map since these criteria would not be attached to versions or dates.  For better or for 
worse, I would say that OpenSimulator development culture is individualistic, where people pick their own goals and 
scratch their own itch rather than decide on things as a 'team'.  This is partly because many of the developers have 
pretty different goals - producing a social grid for 'residents' - let alone an open non-commercial grid like OSGrid - 
is only one of a large number of different use cases.

This is also why residents voting to prioritize specific features or bug fixes won't have much impact - most developers 
have a focus that is outside the residents of OSgrid, especially as nobody is being paid by said residents.  As Bo 
mentioned, maybe money could be collected by residents to do certain features/bugs and give people a big incentive to 
keep residents happy, though I'm sceptical that there are enough residents for this to work.

Anyway, because OpenSim is alpha, it's up to users to track development, inform themselves of progress and bring issues 
to developer attention (which you have done).  Maybe that's hard, but it's going to be hard for a long time with 
software as technical and complex as OpenSim.  Even now, ordinary people don't, for instance, run their own web-servers 
and OpenSim is an order more complex than those.

However, something that could be very usefully done is to research all the areas in which LSL as implemented by OpenSim 
differs from its behaviour on Linden Lab's grid, especially if sit position still isn't accurate.  If you (or someone 
else) were to start doing that and publishing it on the wiki, then that would give us a reference for what might change 
in the future.  A good place to start would be looking at the bugs in Mantis.


On 30/11/11 23:20, Akira Sonoda wrote:
> Hello everybody,
>
> For three years i live in a OSgrid, the test grid for the
> OpenSimulator Software.
>
> A small change in the calculation of avatar positioning for a given
> explicit sit target produced big headache among the content creators
> in OSgrid, because a lot of existing content in the grid has to be
> changed now. A lot of discussion was going on in world and all of the
> discussion ended with the conclusion: "This is alpha Software, you
> have to be prepared for such changes".
>
> Therefore to mitigate the risk of such issues, the logical question
> is: Is there any road map to Beta?
>
> I assume there isn't, therefore the next question would be: When can
> we ( the residents of the various grids and possibly the biggest
> stakeholder group in this project ) see such a road map?
>
> If I check the features page: http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Feature_Matrix
> I see quite a lot of boxes in color green. A few boxes are yellow and
> even fewer boxes are red. Reading the feature matrix list through
> OpenSimulator residents eyes, I think compiling a road map to Beta
> can't be that difficult:
>
> - Decide, which of the red/yellow boxes are part of the Beta
> - create a list what in detail has to be done to turn the yellow/red
> boxes to green and get ready for Beta.
> - publish that list and publish the completion of the tasks in order
> to inform us about the progress.
> - publish early any issues that could have a severe impact to the
> residents. Very important
>
> If my request is completely absurd, then please inform me about your thinking.
> If not, well I'm looking forward to see a nice road map soon!
>
> 12.12.12: OpenSimulator goes Beta ( wouldn't that sound nice?? )
>
> Yours sincerely
> Akira Sonoda
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>


-- 
Justin Clark-Casey (justincc)
http://justincc.org/blog
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