[opensource-dev] from debug to prefences

[Oz Linden (Scott Lawrence)]

On 2011-01-24 20:45, Robert Martin wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 24, 2011 at 7:53 PM, Trilo Byte<trilobyte550m at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> Perhaps the experimental/developer-related debug settings should be accessible from the Developer menu (further removing it from casual users).  Then an 'Advanced Preferences' floater could be made available from the Advanced Menu.  This would allow for an effort to seriously streamline the main/basic SL preferences.
> what needs to happen is a full bore IRS level accounting needs to be
> done on which preferences are actually used and which are
> outdated 2.* series prefs (pull these out)
> outdated 1.* series prefs (pull these out)
> oddball but still used prefs
> dangerous prefs
> normal and menu accessable prefs
> power user prefs
> nonlinden admin prefs
> Linden Only Prefs
> TPV prefs that slipped into the stock viewer (was the feature added to stock??)
>
> and then sit down and document what each one of those does (and
> safe/dangerous values for same

Which illustrates nicely the scope of the problem, and explains part of 
why adding options is costly down the road.

The plain fact is that usually the way we discover which preferences are 
used is to remove (or relocate) them and see who screams (we do get 
prefs settings as part of crash reports, but that only tells us what 
people who crash are using).  As far as we can tell, someone always 
does, and correctly or not thinks that we've hopelessly broken something 
critical.

The other problem is that some settings become "folklore": users, for 
whatever reason, become convinced that if you set preference X to Y then 
bad thing Z doesn't happen (or good thing Z does) when in fact there is 
no relationship at all (or, in fairness, we didn't think that there was 
and the relationship itself is a bug).

So... creating the categorized list you suggest is itself a very large 
job, the results of which will be at best controversial and more 
probably just wrong.   That doesn't mean it's not a noble undertaking 
(the most heroic quests are sometimes futile), but it's a tough sell.