[sldev] Plan for executable switcher

[Dale Glass]

Here's a rough idea I had:

Since plugins will still take a while to materialize, and I think that getting 
testing for new features is a good thing, unless anybody has something like 
this already, I'm going to start work on a program that will allow the user 
to choose which version of SL to run.

Idea so far:

Switcher would be a .NET app written in C#. Source will be available under the 
GPL of course.

Since most people don't have nearly the bandwidth capabilities of LL, making 
things compact is important. For that reason, alternative clients will be 
distributed in say, NSIS packages, but include only the changed files, as 
well as some metadata. The metadata indicates among other things on which LL 
release it's based.

Switcher will assemble a working SL install based on the original files and 
the modifications from the installed package, then run that.

If the third party client is based on a SL version that's not installed (say, 
firstlook based and user is running the stable client), then the switcher 
will try to automatically download the official version to use as a base.

For an user, it would work like this:

* User installs switcher program (which is standalone, and probably will have 
some sort of autoupdate system)

* User goes to my site, and downloads my SL version

* On install, it gets added to the list of available versions in the switcher

* User selects the desired version, clicks "ok"

* Switcher copies an original SL version into a directory, then my 
modifications over that, and launches it.

Probably there would be some sort of auto-update system for third party 
clients, so that an updated version against the latest LL source can be 
downloaded easily.

How does that sound?
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