[sldev] [ATTN-LINDEN] What's the future of the beta grid?

[Joshua Bell]

Nicholaz Beresford wrote:
> I've spent a bit of time lately on the beta grid, but it
> seems to be down ATM.  
Yeah, we were doing a database snapshot update, which takes several 
hours. We announced it to folks in the beta grid at the time, but not 
more broadly. It's an infrequent enough operation and affects few enough 
residents that we don't have formalized communication channels for it.
> Which lead me to the question if
> it will remain there and open to the public (technically
> probably being obsolete with the het grid?)
We still need it for testing at least two classes of testing:

* Central service changes that Het Grid won't help with (it's hard for a 
singleton to be heterogeneous). And of course, yes, there are longer 
term architectural plans to eliminate that sort of broad dependency on a 
single unit. A lot of the grid-of-the-future work that Zero Linden talks 
about as his office hours lead in this direction.
* Testing things that aren't even ready for Het Grid yet, either because 
they're still in internal testing (the beta grid is our biggest test 
grid, so we use that when things are getting "close" to ready) or 
because we're worried about behavior on the main grid and need some 
eyeballs before it gets there. (A permission exploit on even a single 
region on the main grid would be a bad thing.)