[Opensim-dev] Status of master

[Melanie]

We have come quite a ways with this merge, but there are still some
issues left to address.

Unfortunately, I was taken ill a few days before Christmas and have
still not fully recovered. Because of that, things are not happening
as swiftly as I and everyone else could have wished for.

Since my last report, a couple of issues have been addressed. Master
is essentially usable for it's intended purpose, which is to test
and develop against. At this time, we can't say for sure that there
are no regressions, so master cannot be recommended for any kind of
production use. But then, that has always been the case.

One of the issues that cannot be easily fixed is the introduction of
additional Visual Params by Linden Labs. Visual Params are
essentially the sliders that the viewer uses for the shape and
clothing manipulation.

Since the last time this code was touched, Linden Labs has added
some more Visual Params, to wit, the "physics" wearables. Master now
supports these sliders, but adding this support uncovered a long
standing bug in the code for sending the data to the viewer.

Essentially, an array was accessed without bounds checking,
resulting in red ink whenever an avatar from a sim running master
enters a sim running an older version. The avatar will also remain a
cloud in most cases where this happens.

I have pushed a fix for this to 0.7.5-post fixes on git and users
who compile their own can pick it up from there and update their
0.7.5 regions. Versions 0.7.4 and earlier have not received this fix
and will not work with master regions anymore.

I would ask all packagers who ship 0.7.5 to pull the patches from
post-fixes and respin their distributions. Anyone still running
0.7.5 or lower is urgently requested to upgrade to this fixed 0.7.5
release as soon as possible.

With everyone working together, we can make this transition as
painless as possible for the metaverse. We have at this time decided
not to make this a mandatory upgrade to avoid disruption of grids
and HG destinations, but please do consider upgrading as soon as
possible.

- Melanie