Day: January 11, 2020

2020 TPVD meetings week #2 summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Frogmore, November 2019 – blog post

The following notes are taken from the TPV Developer meeting held on January 10th, 2020. A video of the meeting is embedded below, my thanks to Pantera for recording and providing it. As always:

  • Time stamps are given with links that will open the video at the appropriate point in a separate browser tab for reference.
  • Core points of the meeting are listed below. Other subjects of lesser import may have been discussed, please refer to the video.

SL Viewer News

[0:44-2:27]

On Thursday, January 9th, 2020, the following RC viewers updated as follows:

The rest of the viewer release pipelines remain unchanged:

  • Current Release version 6.3.5.533275, formerly the Wassail RC viewer, dated December 4, promoted December 12 – No change.
  • Release channel cohorts:
    • Xanté Maintenance RC viewer, version 6.3.6.533748, December 19.
  • Project viewers:
    • Copy / Paste viewer, version 6.3.5.533365, December 9.
    • Project Muscadine (Animesh follow-on) project viewer, version 6.4.0.532999, November 22.
    • Legacy Profiles viewer, version 6.3.2.530836, September 17. Covers the re-integration of Viewer Profiles.
    • 360 Snapshot project viewer, version 6.2.4.529111, July 16.

General Viewer Notes

  • Both the Xanté Maintenance RC and the Legacy Profiles Viewer have updates that are “close” to appearing in the current viewers list, with Xanté possibly being close to promotion as the de facto viewer as well.
  • As per my week #2 CCUG summary, EEP is still pending the fixing of around a dozen graphics-related issues.
  • The Camera Presets Viewer, designed to allow users to set and save their own preferred camera presets in their viewer without having to use debug settings, is now closing on being “feature complete” and ready for release either as a Project or RC viewer.
    • This capability is being developed as a viewer code contribution by Jonathan Yap (who was responsible for developing the Graphics Presets options).
    • More information on the work can be found in STORM-2145.

Mercurial to Github Migration

[2:29-3:45]

Bitbucket, used to manage viewer repositories) will be sunsetting support for Mercurial in early 2020. Because of this, Linden Lab has been migrating their viewer repositories from Mercurial to Git on Bitbucket.

  • Most of the Lab’s viewer development is now processed via Git.
  • There is some work remaining on converting all of the third-party package repositories, and this is being done as part of the Visual Studio 2017 / Xcode upgrade, rather than being part of the Git migration per se, as these are relatively stable and not seen as a major problem in terms of migrating them.
  • A document outlining the steps in migration has been provided specifically for TPVs to allow them to keep in sync with how LL main the viewer code and its branches. See: Viewer Repository Migration (Google Docs).
    • This is not the only way for TPVs to manage their own repositories, but it is the one that LL recommend for those wishing to reflect how LL manages things.

Visual Studio / Xcode Build Process Update

[4:58-7:30]

The VS 2017 / Xcode upgrade has been caught with a couple of issues:

  • The Boost library used to implement coroutines in the build process would not build using VS 2017 & required conversion to Boost Fibre, which it turn had a number of impacts that also needed to be resolved.
  • Currently, the project is caught on a GIT-related issue, with validating the integration scripts used in the build process, and which is still being worked on.

It’s hoped that the additional work involved in moving the build process to support VS 2017 should make a future move to using VS 2019 easier.

Deprecating Windows 7 Support

[3:48-4:28]

  • Windows 7 officially reaches its end of life on January 14th, 2020. After this date, patches and security updates, etc., will no longer be provided, and the company is unlikely to provide any support.
  • Linden Lab has officially blogged on the subject, which I also blogged about as well.

In Brief

  • [7:55-8:30] There has been no work on the Linux front for official viewer over that last few months, and while still on the road map, is seen as a fairly low priority item, sitting well behind the Git migration, build tools updates, general viewer development and – particularly – the work in transitioning Second life to the AWS cloud.
  • [9:32-10:55] Week #2 restarts. While not generally a part of TPVD meetings, the issues with the Tuesday, January 7th server restarts was mentioned, with Grumpity noting:

It was a rocky day on Tuesday. It came out of our desire to do things in a less disruptive manner and … once again, the road to downtime was once again paved with good intentions, because that way proved to be in no way less disruptive than if we had done things the regular way.

Essentially, the issue was with some restart code that hadn’t been used in a while, and which LL had thought had been fully tested, but when put to use proved to have issues.

  • [15:33-20:23] A reminder was given that – particularly after a viewer crash –  it is better to wait for a short period, rather than immediately trying to re-log (particularly if the warning about logging back in is displayed). This is because each failed attempt refreshes your avatar presence, interfering with the post-crash clean-up (the “you are currently being logged out” part of the message).
    • Note: this part of the meeting included an extensive chat discussion on auto-relogging, as can be present in mobile and other clients, such as Lumiya and Radegast that continues through until the end of the meeting. Please refer to the video for more on this.