Re: [vwrap] Status and future of the VWRAP working group

[Morgaine <[e-mail]>]

Barry, I took some time today to re-read every technical item posted here
since your mail of March 23rd, and this is how I would summarize our recent
burst of activity:


   - It seems that there is significant unhappiness about LLSD, for a range
   of reasons.  Some are wondering why we are creating a new ADT rather than
   using an existing one like Protocol Buffers, while others are worried on a
   deeper level that LLSD is too rooted in SL legacy and gives us very little
   for the future.  (I did not voice an opinion on that subject in this round,
   but I have in the past expressed worries about LLSD extensibility.)


   - All discussions now seem to be taking multiple worlds into account,
   which is a huge step forwards for interop and should serve us well for
   document writing,  We are periodically giving assurance that "nobody is
   going to force you to interoperate", although that should really be obvious
   even to casual onlookers since denying interop is so easy.  Additionally, it
   is our stated goal to support all deployment patterns, and the walled garden
   is one of those.


   - We have ascertained that we are not "writing docs just to write docs",
   but only docs that reflect consensus.  Your description "tease consensus out
   of discussion and write it down" was very appealing.  We are still at the
   teasing stage, but I do sense a convergence coming.


   - An attempt was made to gain a priori agreement to always accept
   superset requirements in VWRAP, or to put it another way, to adopt a group
   mantra of "design for tomorrow".  I'm still not really sure whether it was
   the concept itself which attracted strong opposition (which I think would be
   most regrettable) or if the arguments were merely about choice of words.


   - Vaughn's wonderful protocol flow diagram kicked off an excellent
   discussion about protocol details.  This was (remarkably) the first time we
   had ever discussed the asset access protocol over these 2-3 years of work,
   and it led us to examine two very important issues: (i) eliminating the
   burden of capabilities when there are no access restrictions on an asset,
   and (ii) separation of assets into metadata and content.  This got us much
   closer to the real core of VWRAP than we have ever been, namely the asset
   services.


   - A previously unmentioned optional requirement appeared in the
   discussion:  simulation consistency.  Although optional, our protocol will
   need to allow it to be achieved (to the extent possible) when it is demanded
   by a region.


Given all the above (and many other things discussed in passing), I am not
at all unhappy with recent progress, and indeed it could be said that we
achieved more for interop in 2 weeks than in the previous 2+ years.  With
regards to writing documents, we're still teasing out the technical details,
but as we do this, our more general goals are starting to solidify as well,
so I think that an Intro doc will come in due course.

I do accept that this isn't happening very rapidly, but with so few bodies
assisting in the analysis, it's hard to do better.  Nevertheless, I think
that we are achieving something useful.

We may be even be close to condensing the recent discussions into a
paragraph or two, because full solutions are not needed for an Intro.


Morgaine.




=========================

On Sat, Apr 30, 2011 at 5:45 PM, Barry Leiba <[e-mail]>wrote:

> > That said, we need to be leading this discussion on consensus that can
> > be documented and posted.  And we need to focus on that and accomplish
> > it soon, for a vague but near-term value of "soon".
>
> We had a good bit of discussion in early April.  Now that we're at the
> end of April, and the discussions seem to have stopped for the last
> couple of weeks, I'd like a progress report.  Has there been any work
> on coming to consensus on the direction the group wants to take?  Any
> progress on consensus for the contents of an intro/overview document?
>
> Barry, as chair
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