[opensource-dev] Migrating open development focus to 2.x

[Latif Khalifa]

On Thu, May 27, 2010 at 11:50 PM, Oz Linden (Scott Lawrence)
<oz at lindenlab.com> wrote:
> It's fairly clear that Linden Lab doesn't have the resources to devote
> to active work on both Snowglobe 1.x and 2.x, and it's not efficient for
> the community as a whole to be splitting effort.

Snowglobe is an opensource project. Sure Linden Lab can decide not to
do anything about 1.x (not that it has done much about it in the past
year or so anyway), but you cannot tell the outside contributors what
they want to focus on. And most of them still want to improve on SG
1.x.

> I'd like to fairly quickly get to the point where all our new work is
> happening on the 2.x branch.  That said, I understand that might leave
> behind things that the Snowglobe user/dev base wants and that some
> people are not happy with some elements of 2.x.  What I'd like to know
> is... what needs to happen to make that choice that most people can be
> happy with?

I'm afraid this is not going to be very easy Oz. It's not likely that
a lot of new development is going to go to 2.0 since a lot of people
find the UI much more difficult to use. And Linden Lab has in the past
few months since the introduction of the new UI only be willing to do
minor tweaks to it, nothing of substance. See the JIRA's and mailing
list threads about chat bar focus where the response from the head of
the viewer team was basically "no can do", complain all you want but
that's not changing. With attitude like that from LL the response is
not surprising, OK, no we cannot move to 2.0 with such an inflexible
approach to fixing most glaring UI issues.

> One of my goals is to increase the rate and volume at which Linden Lab
> can (and _does_) take changes from the open source base into the
> internal code, but unless we can keep everyone on the same branch, that
> will be much more difficult.

This would be good indeed. It was very sad to see that almost none of
bugs that were fixed in SG 1.x tree were taken upstream. Viewer 2.0
was released choke full of bugs (including crashers that could lead to
potential exploits) that were fixed moths and months before in the
public SG repository.

> Please respond to this thread with your favorite reasons not to move
> development to 2.x.   We will review the list at the 6 June open source
> meeting with the goal of setting some priorities.

It's UI, the UI and more of UI. While the 2.0 at the first glance
looks nice and modern compared to 1.x it's usability is far worse. 1.x
UI could be skinned to look much more modern and many TPV already do
this.