[opensource-dev] Proposal: Howto add a new feature to snowglobe.

[Carlo Wood]

On Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 06:00:08PM -0300, Tigro Spottystripes wrote:
> what if the bug fix includes changes in behavior that for some users is
> considered a bug in itself? (like how it happened at first with the
> issue of auto-granted permissions permanency being abused, where the
> initial proposal of simply auto-revoking hen the avatar stands up would
> break content that produced a graceful transition from sitting to
> standing up by animating the avatar right after it stopped being sat on
> the prim)

If it really breaks a lot of content then the bug was
apparently a feature ;). In that case it might be considered
undesirable to "fix" the bug as if it never existed; some
backwards compatibility might be needed.

However, I don't think that that should be very much the
concern of Linden Lab. If the consensus on the list is
that a bug should be fixed even if it breaks existing content
then we have apparently a reason for that.

Linden Lab (read: merov) should foremost look at the extra
work that it will create to keep the internal repository
in sync with a snowglobe that has this feature / bug fix.
If Linden Lab does not want the bug fix as you decribe, then
I think the best approach is to try and convince the committer
who offered to put time into fixing it, to do it in a different
way, so that his patch WILL be accepted in the official viewer.

-- 
Carlo Wood <carlo at alinoe.com>