[sldev] Getting a community/sandbox area in the SL SVN repository?

[Able Whitman]

At the Open Source meeting today (
https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Open_Source_Meeting/2007-07-19), there was
talk of getting a sandbox / community / insert-label-here area on
svn.secondlife.com, along with giving folks with signed source contribution
agreements SVN access to the repository.

I think this is a great idea--and it seemed like the general consensus was
extremely positive--so I'm curious if there's a timeline for putting
something like this together.

The reason I'm asking is that right now we've got a few people providing
their own viewer distributions (me, Nicholaz, and Dale) with varying
combinations of patches. And Dzonatas has been putting together a proper
repository for the OS.1, .2, and .3 releases, which serve as a good testbed
of all the community-submitted JIRA patches all in one big pot. And every
different flavor of viewer has different installers, different branding
changes, etc.

It's great to give people the chance to test JIRA patches before they're
integrated into the official viewer, but it's also a pretty fractious
situation. Having a single recognized repository for integrating
community-contributed patches helps simplify the problem of "what patches
are where", it will make branding / icon / trademark changes easier to
standardize, it will make it possible to have common installers for each
platform, among other things. Plus as we've already seen with the recent
Vista issue with OS.3, problems like providing libraries built against the
right source with the right compiler (at least for Windows) are easier to
solve when there's one place to go for build scripts and such.

If getting set up with svn.secondlife.com is something that can happen in
the fairly near future, that would be awesome. If it's going to take some
time, then in the meantime I think it makes sense to use the repository
Dzonatas has setup as a sort of stop-gap for the time being, if necessary.
My concern is just that doing the work to get such a repository working and
able to produce builds for each platform will require a good amount of work
from a bunch of people. It would be really nice to know if it made sense to
do that work now, or wait until svn.secondlife.com was available and do that
work then.

Cheers,
--Able
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