[sldev] Roadmap: 1.19.0 Viewer

[Joshua Bell]

As might be inferred from the number, we are planning on making the 
1.19.0 Viewer update mandatory for residents at some point in the near 
future – probably early February. There are two stages to this:

* Stage 1: The viewer itself will be made mandatory; that is, previous 
viewer versions will be blocked on login. This will have no effect on 
third party viewers or viewers built from the source, provided they 
report a different channel/version than Linden Lab’s production viewers. 
We plan on doing this in early February; probably a week or two after 
1.19.0 Viewer has entered production.
* Stage 2: Login via the new web-key based authentication will be 
required; support for transmitting a name/password pair to the login URI 
will be dropped. This is in anticipation of enabling our anti-fraud team 
to make changes to the login process, either globally or for individual 
logins, without requiring viewer changes. We do not expect this to 
happen until March at the soonest, so that third party viewer providers 
have plenty of time to accommodate the source changes (already present 
in the 1.18.6 viewer source drops) and take advantage of additional work 
we’re doing (details below)

The driving reasons for making 1.19.0 mandatory are:
* to ensure that all residents are connecting with viewers that support 
the web-based authentication, to enable our anti-fraud efforts
* to reduce support costs by ensuring that the bulk of our residents are 
on a common code base – we’re currently supporting viewers back through 
August
* to eliminate enable some server-side cleanup (eliminate code only 
present for compatibility with older viewers)

In more detail:
* The bulk of the viewer authentication changes are already in the 
1.18.6 viewer source. Only cosmetic changes, and tools for third party 
developers, are going into 1.19.
* We have identified three main failure modes for logins with the 1.18.6 
viewer code base (login screen not appearing, stuck “Loading…”, logins 
timing out, etc), and they all stem from a load balancer problem that is 
currently being investigated internally. Obviously, releasing 1.18.6 and 
any subsequent viewers is gated on solving this.
* The viewer authentication team’s current focus is on bugs (above) and 
helping third party developers work with the new authentication:
** Support for clients which do not have a browser, including support 
for web authentication via LLSD instead of XML/RPC. Development on this 
is in progress now.
** A "continuation url" login page for thin, Web-based clients. This is 
live and being tested by a third party. We will send out the full demo 
and instructions to SLDEV this week.
** Full frameset delivery of login pages, with a specifiable CSS, for 
third party viewer vendors. We will send out instructions this week to 
our licensed vendors, SLDEV and document on the public Wiki.

...

We're still pulling together the release notes for 1.19.0, but the 
high-level summary is:

* 61 bug fixes
* "Voice 1.1"
** Introduces moderated to (formal) group voice and group text conversations
** Moderation ability applies to group owner and group officer roles
** Moderation will NOT apply to one-to-one text or voice chat, ad-hoc 
group conversation, or to spatial voice chat.
* Auto-joining group chat sessions has been removed
** Group members must explicitly choose to actively "join" their SL 
Group's chat sessions after they log in.
** Starting a new SL group chat only adds the requester to the chat 
session much like an IRC channel.

Obviously, for the voice moderation and group chat improvements there 
are server side components, so these features will not "light up" until 
we've updated the servers, which is tentatively planned for next week.

...

And while I'm here, here's what we're expecting in 1.18.6 RC4 (deltas 
from RC3) - some of the changes failed QA so we'll need to iterate a bit:

* Language names need to have a consistent format in preferences drop-down
* QuickTime disabled message cannot be ignored
* Linux client doesn't recognize that a viewer is already running
* Display HTML error page in selected language when viewer is unable to 
connect to second life URL
* VWR-3667;About Land > Access: On group owned land, group owner gets 
eject message when "Public Access" is unchecked
* VWR-3829: Cursor in Logon edit boxes difficult to see
* VWR-3501: Create/Edit Gesture window preview button blanks after pressing
* VWR-4010: New search does not accept non ASCII characters
* VWR-3539: Communicate window width will no longer resize smaller in 
1.18.5.3