Trinity Dejavu

You need a grace period to pull some sources, kick the build server and someone to knock up a blog post ?

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Adeon Writer

A positive integer of time, yes.

Jack Abraham

I will say this for Oz: He's the first Linden to ever follow up a JIRA comment with me via email to make sure he understood what I said.

ETA: He did.

Beezle Warburton

Not a float?

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Siana Gearz

A float is two integers and a flag. One integer is sufficient.

Innula Zenovka

These will be interesting questions to raise in the interview Jessica mentions the other thread

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Ailsa Muliaina

It takes all of 5 mins tops to remove a download link. Even if few people are downloading it, surely that's more reason to take it out - they won't miss it LL may not have demanded that you remove any offending versions of Phoenix, but that doesn't mean you can't do more than is asked of you. it's good PR for one thing.

I got the impression your team want users to move towards Firestorm in the future. You've got the retro skin on the go, perfect timing to get a few Phoenix users trying Firestorm again.

But I've accepted we'll be playing a waiting game till LL fix this thing up a bit. It's not just a case of bolting the stable door after the horse is out. In this case it feels like the stable hand isn't that bothered what the horse is up to, and would rather wait for someone else to catch him.

Kadah Coba

Soonish? I'm swapped IRL and have barely been able to do anything related to SL besides reading SLU. So its all you peoples fault its not (joke).

Never I think. Oz said we didn't have to do anything about the old versions and I haven't heard anything otherwise from him or LL since.
And these weren't changes to the TOS policy, that's something else.

Kadah Coba

Actually, not only am I'm extremely busy IRL at work, I've been having some health problems lately and will be out of commission for most of next week or longer. So if we're unable to get it out this weekend, it will be easily another week before I'll be do a do a build and hand roll a package for it.

And Oz's own words, he said that it should be removed in the next release or the one after that, he did not seemed concerned with when it happened, just that it would at some point. I will make a best effort to get this release out as soon as possible, but I am unable to make any promises in my current status.

Argent Stonecutter

Swapped?!

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The previous is a cybernetic datum published - in direct contravention of DoD Regulation #229RR3X3 - as being conducive to the physical, psychological and/or social well-being of the population.

Kadah Coba

Apparently so, its a BOOL and set to FALSE.



(If you don't get the joke, you don't know LL code.)

Leah Mayo

A cruel, but perfect way to do the task would be NOT UPDATING Phoenix to meet the new privacy requirements, and announce on the Phoenix site that due to wrong TPV policy by LL the Phoenix viewer becomes illegal

Innula Zenovka

While I understand Phoenix's problems with updating, as clearly does Oz, when he didn't appear too bothered about if and when Phoenix updates, he must have thought, at the time, that it didn't really matter since LL would soon be breaking True Online Status anyway, thus solving the problem for them. At Phoenix' current release rate, "the next release or the one after that" could easily mean "the back end of this year, if we're lucky," and I'm not sure that's what he must have intended. Be worth asking him, anyway.

Now things have changed, to my mind it puts the ball back in Phoenix' court, and I think it's wholly reasonable to ask Phoenix when they at least expect to have a ToS compliant viewer available for download by Phoenix-users who actually want to use a ToS-complaint viewer. And it's reasonable, too, so Phoenix know where they stand, for LL to make it clear what the deadline is for Phoenix to become fully compliant if it wants to stay on the TPV list, at least, and, in the long term, if older versions aren't to be blocked.

I can understand the problems with updating older versions of Phoenix so they don't crash, but it's not as if Phoenix is the only viewer available, and if Phoenix users find themselves forced to use Firestorm, or even another viewer, until Phoenix devs are able to make the viewer fully compliant, that's not the end of the world. And it's not as if the ToS are optional, after all.

Ailsa Muliaina

Ack, busy and ill is never a good combination.

Is there nobody else on the team who can just take the download down and give you and the team more time to work on the new version? Anyone who can edit your site should be able to take the links down and give you breathing time. Your Phoenix users just have to be patient. If they've already got a version installed and LL aren't going to log them out, chances are they aren't going to be foaming at the mouth for an upgrade anyways. Your health and wellbeing are much more important than Phoenix development, especially if Oz isn't in a huge hurry for you to upgrade.

Trinity Dejavu

This was in light of the plans to break the LSL server side.That is not happening which places the ball back in the phoenix teams court to bring their camp into compliance. This now includes all old versions kicking around as without the lab doing it for you they are in breach too.

You're not the only person who can grab the sources for the last release, patch and press compile. It takes less time than I spent writing this reply.

Siana Gearz

Actually, Oz made a promise back then that there is no particular hurry, and has not said anything new about this. This misfeature has been there for quite a while, it doesn't matter all that much whether it'll stay for another couple of weeks in the grand scheme of things.

Though yes, there is not much point in stretching time there.

Adeon Writer

Any Phoenix user wishing to comply with ToS can disable the true online status feature. That will clear them of any personal negative consequences of using the viewer.

Leah Mayo

I don't think that legalises the viewer, though. In worst scenario LL starts mass baning for the use of malicious software

What about an LSL bridge fix? Could that be done reliably without a viewer update?

Adeon Writer

It doesn't legalize the viewer, but it's not the user's responsibility at that point, it's the viewer's creator.

They only need to worry about the viewer getting banned. If the user isn't violating privacy, there is zero change of getting banned for using a privacy violating viewer. (unless the viewer is banned and they work around it.

ETE grammar

Innula Zenovka

If it's a couple of weeks, that's one thing, and if Jessica announces there will be a ToS-compliant Phoenix available in a couple of weeks' time, or even three or four, and that everyone's encouraged to update to it, then great.

But that doesn't address the problem of happens to all the people who are unwilling to update, because they're on previous versions of Phoenix and have already found the current version doesn't work too well on their machines, or simply because they like the True Online Status feature. When Oz was talking about DATA_ONLINE being broken in the near future, that wasn't so much of an issue -- the problem would solve itself.

However, now LL have accepted there are lots of legitimate uses for llRequestAgentData(id,DATA_ONLINE), though sticking it in the Phoenix bridge isn't among them, and that it's going to take take time for them to decide what to do about the lsl function, the ball is now firmly back in Phoenix' court when it comes to deciding what to about people who insist on using the older, non-compliant, versions of their viewer even after the update is available.

Or, of course, LL could solve that problem for them, too, but that's probably not anyone's preferred solution.

In the meantime, though, it would be a nice gesture of good faith, to my mind, if Phoenix stopped distributing their non-compliant viewer to any more people, and put up a notice on their website explaining why and that a new one will be available soon.

Qie Niangao

Honestly, if I had the task of keeping Phoenix available, I'd see this as the perfect opportunity to scuttle it. No need to blame LL, no need to make a fuss, just say that it's had a good run, the developers have lost interest, the older versions are login-disabled because nobody wants to support it anymore, thanks for all the fish.

There'd be a day or two while Phoenix users wail, gnash, &c, but as long as the Phoenix team stayed uniformly upbeat about it, the whole thing would blow over quickly (yeah, so a few switch to some other v1-based viewer for a while--who cares?), and there'd be no more distraction from Firestorm development.

Darien Caldwell

That's like saying it's ok to log in with a copybot viewer as long as you don't copy anything. I really don't think that's true.

The Phoenix Devs have a responsibility to their userbase to release a legal viewer as soon as humanly possible. Trying to find loopholes to justify not updating phoenix is not only lame, but putting everyone involved at ristk. I would think what happened when Emerald refused to make LL's requested changes would serve as a lesson.

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Ayesha Lytton

LOL you guys have no idea of the huge % of the grid that uses Phoenix. Disabling it and forcing people to Firestorm would cause mass chaos. A lot of the people I work with (such as musicians) would freak out at having to change viewers without notice, even to a different v1 type. The true online status was in Phoenix and Emerald before it, it has been around for YEARS. You won your little crusade to get rid of it, but ffs let it be phased out in a painless manner as people update rather than causing mass disruption to the grid and to innocent people who had no part in this and don't even care about the feature.

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Adeon Writer

Actually, that was the example I was going to give.

Using a Copybot viewer is not against ToS, distributing one is.

Kadah Coba

I was the one hinting that it was going to be removed anyway before that Friday. When I say I'm going to make a best effort to get it out as soon as I can, I mean I'll sneak my laptop in to hospital if I have to. I'm sorry if I have more important things to do than getting a release out a week earlier, like not not being in sever pain all the damn time.

Indeed, which is why I've been hoping to force builds in to QA this weekend.

Not really, building phoe for release is a right pain in the butt because the machine that builds it needs to have the right mixture of runtimes so that the binary actually works for most people; I blame Emerald for this since it apparently had the same issues. It took me at least 3 months of experimented with testers to get a build environment "properly" setup. There's also the issue with the lack of a working packager, which comes from Emeralds too. I think they did it intentionally and I've failed many times in the past to fix it. The way I've been having to work around it is to hand roll every stupid installer myself. The whole compile and package process takes about 3 or so hours to do both windows versions.

Then there is the matter of Mac and Linux which I'm not setup to do, and Mac apparently requires some heavy wizardry that only Tonya knows.


After I took over doing the windows releases for the viewer sometime last year, I then felt that it was probably a stupid idea to have forked from Emerald in the first place.