[sldev] Linden Lab Viewer Release Roadmap - 2007-01-14

[Joshua Bell]

Alissa Sabre wrote:
> On the public JIRA, there are several issue reporting against
> 1.19.0.76838 source.  Some of them have patches already.  I want as
> many Linden devs as possible to just glance over them before 1.19.0
> source (re)freeze, if not yet.  I personally think some big changes
> (similar to Linux voice support) are not relevant to be integrated
> into 1.19.0 source tree at this timing, but simple one-line bug fixes
> are.
>   
I'll try and take a peek soon. Of course, the 1.19.0 viewer will go 
through the usual RC iterations so there is plenty of opportunity for 
regression fixes.
> I'm not 100% confortable with the fact that Linden employees opinions
> expressed on this list has been supportive to Lindens' (past)
> decision, and I really don't understand why LL (as a company, or a
> development team, as opposed to each Linden employee) has change its
> mind suddenly.  I believe LL carefully compared pros and cons on the
> two possibilities, and decided to revert these changes at this moment.
>   
This is a complicated statement and I'm not sure I understand it 
completely, but let me clarify:

* The new web-based login authentication mechanism is still the 
direction we wish to pursue. However, the current implementation was not 
"converging" (we were finding as many bugs as we were fixing) on both 
the viewer and server side. The choices were (1) release as-is, (2) keep 
iterating, (3) re-implement, (4) postpone and possibly re-implement. We 
chose #4. Again, this was based on the data that we collected over the 
RC iterations.
* The group chat changes were announced here very early - basically, as 
soon as 1.19 started to coalesce, and well before most of the people at 
Linden had a chance to think about the changes. This is a case of the 
SLDEV community basically having a chance to provide feedback extremely 
early - IMHO, a good thing!

Let this be more evidence that Linden is not a group mind operating 
according to some sinister master plan, merely a bunch of developers 
(etc) trapped behind a communication and collaboration barrier we're 
trying to chip down whilst doing other work. (Sorry, the analogy just 
popped into my head.)

Joshua