[sldev] Re: More plugin / platform harping..

[John Hurliman]

Matthew Dowd wrote:
> I'm not saying have a means to add extensions to the viewer which do not break every minor update isn't important, just that it isn't a priority.
>
> What you are describing may bring more people into SL, and may make more people see the potential and relevance once they get there, however, it doesn't matter how extensible or powerful or versatile the platform is, whe you are lost yet another days work due to inventory loss, or given up working in SL for the day yet again because it is too laggy, or xyz is broken etc. people aren't going to be motivated to continue using SL regardless how clever or impressive third party extensions are!
>
> Jason was saying that he doesn't want to build extensions around the the current sourcecode since it would break every few weeks until he recompiled the code and his customers would not be impressed as "People don't like software that breaks every two weeks." The same sentiment applies to SL itself, Jason probably doesn't want the same customers coming to him complaining of problems in his extension which are really SL reliability problems.
>
> To repeat that sentiment "People don't like software that breaks every two weeks.", which is a good description of SL at the moment, and I do believe that the bulk of the 90% of signups SL currently loses are due to reliability issues, not the lack of additional plugins and given the choice of having a reliable SL platform or some clever plugins would opt for the former. Also the lack of such tools isn't dampening the high interest rate or initial sign up at the moment, either.
>
> Successful platforms are both extensible and reliable, and at the moment my belief is that the emphasis should be on the reliability to retain the existing users before adding plugin APIs to allow third party extensions to attract and retain new users.
>
> Matthew
>   

I don't have access to the database clusters or the simulator source 
code to work on making the grid more reliable. If I see something in the 
client source code that could make things more stable or reliable I'll 
report it and/or submit a patch for it, so your request is going to the 
wrong audience here. Whether the open source developers on sldev choose 
to work on UI improvements or UI exensibility or something else entirely 
doesn't change the stability of the grid, so bringing that up is a bit 
of a red herring to the discussion. "Fix the grid" might be a trump card 
to throw at Linden developers (even if many of them are 3D programmers 
and have no idea how the backend services work? I never understood that 
part), but no one here can help grid stability other than posting bug 
reports with useful information and repros.

John