[sldev] About the http-texture project

[Philippe Bossut (Merov Linden)]

Hi Mike,

I saw you have some questions about the branches, the projects and  
http-texture in your last 2 posts:

On Apr 30, 2009, at 8:18 AM, Mike Monkowski wrote:
>      I am under the impression that all of these open source viewer
> projects are intended to eventually get merged in and go live.  The
> hppt-texture branch
> http://svn.secondlife.com/trac/linden/browser/branches/2009/http-texture
> became the http-texture project
> http://svn.secondlife.com/trac/linden/browser/projects/2009/http-texture

OK, there is some confusion here: the project did not "become"  
something else. The purpose of the "branches" and "projects" svn nodes  
are mechanical svn conventions we use to make our merge work easier,  
*both* relate to the same project (called "http-texture" for the time  
being). I tried to explain that in a previous post:

On Apr 24, 2009, at 3:36 PM, Philippe Bossut (Merov Linden) wrote:
> "branches" is the parking repository for the "vendor" version, the
> code that gets exported by LL into the OSS realm. That's where code
> lands when they throw it over the wall (<disclaimer>I'm being
> facetious here with my use of vocabulary and, in that particular
> instance, that's me throwing code over the wall</disclaimer>). We (as
> open source developers) are not supposed to modify branches ever. They
> are sacred and represent what comes from Lindens. We build it though
> to make sure it's not evil, that our changes don't get stomped by
> Linden updates and that we like it enough to merge it into our  
> projects.


Rob followed by a post of his own and updated the wiki describing the  
branches:
    http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Source_branches

I hope this clears the objective of the svn hierarchy.

> Yeah, I'm confused too (but not sneaky or underhanded) :-).  There
> needs to be a whole lot more documented on this new open source viewer
> concept.

Not sure which missing documentation you're referring to but we have 3  
at the moment:
- https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/HTTP_Texture_Development :  
describes what we're trying to achieve in the next roll of this release
- http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/HTTP_Texture : goes into gory  
details about the http-texture background work (clearly needs more work)
- http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/S3_based_viewer_map : goes into the  
implementation of the new map UI, the only part of the project that  
pulls jpeg textures using http

There are things we discussed but haven't documented yet, mostly:
- gather perf data as part of the builds: we are thinking about just  
picking the launch time as a first goal on that road. I've been  
looking at attempt at this internally as several groups independently  
tried this already. Ideas from the group on this would be great!
- crash rate reports: we're doing some reading manually but we need to  
extract some data and post them in a graph form somewhere  
automatically. Since this means accessing some DB not available  
publicly, this is clearly a task that's on Linden's laps.

Hope this answer some of your questions. I saw you added this to the  
agenda for this afternoon's Hippo meeting so we'll discuss that  
subject there again.

Cheers,
- Merov