[sldev] 1.23.4 released in a hurry ? NO.

[Latif Khalifa]

> I absolutely claim that 1.23 is not only of releasable quality, but the best
> viewer we've ever shipped. It met its design goals on RC1. The bugs that
> were found and fixed in the next 3 RCs were minimal. On a global statistics
> level, the crash rates are lower than they've ever been, even when you
> include crashes caused by specific video cards.
>
> There are some individuals who are upset about some of the design decisions,
> like the redesign of pie menus. That's not a quality issue. There are other
> individuals who are upset about some of the technical decisions, such as the
> imposition of rendering limits where we never had them before. That's not a
> quality issue either. And there are people who don't like the new Adult-Only
> stuff. That's also not a quality issue.
>
> The definition of quality is meeting the specification. We executed on this
> viewer better than we've ever done it before, and I'm pretty proud of our
> team for doing it.
>
> By the way, contrary to the implication in the subject line, we released
> 1.23.4 almost exactly according to the schedule I announced internally in
> February. The internal decision to ship was based on quality. As every
> professional software organization does, for every open issue we balance the
> risk of shipping a product with that issue against the risk of trying to fix
> it. When all the risks of shipping are lower than the risks of fixing, we
> ship it. Which is what we did with RC4.

Yes, it was released exactly on schedule. And it was released despite
many reports about fresh new bugs discovered during the public RC
process. Issues like VWR-12984 which makes doing anything in a skybox
or a build platform unbearable with 1.23. Issue reported back in April
with included snapshots and videos for easy repro.

It was released despite wide-spread problems with avatar rendering
making nearby avatars become fully or partially invisible (VWR-12906),
issue that was reproduced during a bug triage with 5 Lindens in
attendance. Or avatars all of a sudden becoming "cloud ghosts" when
they attempt to change outfit (VWR-12934 which claims to be fixed, but
its not).

Or issues that you claim to be working as expected (VWR-13868) where
prims you deem to complex to render simply vanish from the view when
zooming instead of degrading their rendering quality if they're
causing trouble. From user perspective this is always a bug despite
fancy technical rationalizations why it is not.

So if by quality you mean "released on schedule", then sure, this is
high quality release indeed.

-- L