[opensource-dev] Backports vs code reversal (was: Re: Open Development project: extending avatar wearables)

[Henri Beauchamp]

On Tue, 23 Mar 2010 06:16:32 -0500, Argent Stonecutter wrote:

> On 2010-03-23, at 05:50, Henri Beauchamp wrote:
> > Whether or not I'll develop a v2.0 branch depends on how much work  
> > will be needed to revert the whole UI (yes !) to the one currently
> > existing in the Cool SL Viewer (which is a (much) improved, pre-voice
> > UI).
>
> As in, would it be easier to do that or to track the actual feature  
> improvements in the new viewer?

Backporting the new features of viewer 2.0 to v1.23 is extremely tedious
although not impossible.

I already backported the Alpha and Tattoo support to v1.23 (and I hope soon
to v1.19: still a glitch to solve dealing with rendering within v1.19: it's
ok for baked textures sent to the server from v1.19 but for now Alphas
don't render properly in v1.19 itself), and I may also backport inventory
links and the new script functions, but doing more would prove very
difficult given the enormous amount of code changes that occurred between
v1.23 and v2.0 (with lots of changes to the C++ objects and their API):
just to give you a small idea, the diff between v1.23 and v2.0 is over 24Mb
large (and that's only the diff for the .cpp, .h and main (en-us) .xml
files)...

With my experience of the backports I did from v1.2x viewers to v1.19
(with very significant changes as well between them since v1.19 was
pre-Windlight), I can tell you it is not exactly an easy task (but it
was worth maintaining v1.19 for so long since it still represents almost
half of the downloads for the Cool SL Viewer, showing how many "old
computer" users were left in the blue by LL with the move to Windlight).

It would be easier for me to move on to v2.0 (like I did so far with the
main branch of the Cool SL Viewer, moving to v1.20, then 1.21, 1.22 and
1.23), but only as long as LL doesn't break all what existed in the v1.23
UI...

My free time is not infinite, by far, and reverting very large chunks
of code leads to many troubles each time the official viewer is updated
(for example from v2.0 to v2.1)...

Henri.