[sldev] [PROTOCOL] Protocol Documentation

[Lawson English]

Argent Stonecutter wrote:
>
>
> I'm not knocking Linden Labs here. Open Sourcing the client was an 
> amazingly cool thing, it was really courageous of them to do that, and 
> I'm not criticizing them where they haven't gone further by any means. 
> I'm just trying to promote another kind of openness... one that's as 
> old a part of the software industry as Open Source and just as 
> important... and arguing that it needs some kind of commitment from LL 
> that they don't seem to have made:
>
> * LL: we can't log every change, it would be cluttered and irrelevant
> * LL: the source code is very clear on how all of this works
> * LL: it [the code] is very clear documentation
> * LL: so this whole discussion about documenting the capability API is 
> just so people can steal code?
This was excerpted from  a confused argument about open source, [open] 
source documentation, the need for clear architectural goals, etc., 
during Zero's office hours.


The fact is, the Linden Labs programming style, at least in the client, 
doesn't appear to lend itself well to #'s 2 & 3, regardless of how 
committed they are to #1.

And I put "open" inside brackets before documentation because it is very 
obvious, having dealt with parts of the GUI for the last few weeks, that 
the documentation of various parts of the code can't be made more "open" 
because it obviously doesn't exist in any coherent form.

And without clear documentation, clear architectural goals are likely an 
iffy issue as well.

This is a pervading corporate culture, not a conspiracy or even a 
conscious decision about open documentation/goals.


L.