[opensource-dev] Missing capabilities.

[Henri Beauchamp]

On Tue, 12 Oct 2010 08:37:42 -0700, Kelly Linden wrote:

> I'm confused on this. While the term 'capability' is a bit vague, in SL
> development / programming it is very specific. It is not a flag that
> indicates the availability of a feature - it is an access point to access
> features. It has the great side benefit of being able to indicate the
> availability of those features by the presence of the capability. However
> not all features are new capabilities.
> 
> What I'm getting at is that we shouldn't add dummy capabilities to indicate
> the presence of a features that doesn't use a capability. It sounds like we
> need some ability to indicate the availability of specific features - either
> some feature map or versioning on specific capabilities. If we extended the
> ability of an existing capability, perhaps we should have included a version
> in some way when we did so. If the feature did not use capabilities (the
> inventory is still a mix of legacy, event poll and capabilities isn't it?) -
> then perhaps there is another way to determine if the feature is supported.

Be it by a "fake" capabilty (in the SL acception of the term) returning
(for example) a simple "true" string, or by another mean (a map of flags
returned by a new server message ?... But then we'd need to know if that
server message is supported or not on the grid we connect to...), there
is indeed a need for the viewer to know whether or not the servers (and
this includes the assets server in the particular case of inventory links)
can or cannot support the new features.

The failure to know this and to take it into account in the viewer is one
of the reasons why viewer 2 is incompatible with OpenSim grids (other
reasons being viewer 2's inability to use asset server tiles for the
world map, or hard coded URLs in the code, for example).

So, yes, something should be done to correct this problem.

Another nice thing to have would be to be able to determine on login
whether the viewer connects to SL or to an OpenSim grid, since with the
TPV policy and the differences between the existing grids TOS, the viewer
may or may not use some features depending on the grid it connects to (so
far I detect SL grids based on their URI (IP or plain text URI), but this
is not as reliable as a returned value from the grid servers would be).

Henri.