As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, one part of my new post-CEO life is leading a small development team.  Our first project was improving the website map.

wikitecture.png

After considering what to do next, we’ve decided to move our team’s work completely into the public, with the hope that we can engage and support the open source community more directly than before, and move more rapidly in making SL better.  We have created a new version of the Second Life client in a public repository where we will allow direct committing from community members alongside our own daily work.  We have also created a new build system to keep this version continuously building when new submissions are received, with new builds available to everyone.  We will also make this version available as a download alongside the official SL client, once we have it sufficiently stable.  Additionally we will aggressively manage the quality of submissions to this new repository, working with the community to develop appropriate ways of testing, reviewing, and approving changes.

Our hope is that we can create a widely-used openly developed version of the Second Life client which is a compelling alternative for a broad set of users, and contains enhancements and development that then rapidly make their way back into the mainstream Second Life version.

Both my team and the existing open source LL team members will take a very active role in this project.  This means providing lots of daily leadership and communication about direction, and reviewing and accepting or rejecting submissions.

As mentioned above, and in contrast to our existing open source efforts, this new project will feature:
  • Ability for contributors to directly commit code to a public repository in which the Linden Lab team is also directly working.
  • Automated build system which operates immediately on checkins and produces publically-accessible executables.
  • Distribution of the new version alongside main SL viewer distributions.
  • Automated unit and performance testing with public results.

The new version we’ve deployed into the public repository has a substantial set of enhancements to make the SL map zoom and perform much like the SLurl.com website map, and much better/faster than the map in the release viewer.  This code needs QA and seemed like a great baseline for our work.

For more information on the project, visit the open source portal. You can also join the developer mailing list.

Original post by communities@secondlife.com