April Fool
Mar 31st
With the TVP policy set to be live tomorrow, I will be pulling the non compliant debs from the servers, that means the old Imprudence 1.2 and the omvviewer and omvviewer-1.23 builds, sorry about that snowglobe is still there and the only compliant viewer that I am shipping.
I am also in 2 minds if snowglobe should be kept as debs, the TVP policy has already stopped nearly all viewer development under fear of unlimited liability from LL. The exact wording of the TVP is not developer friendly, sure they probably had good intentions but its a poorly crafted document and you can’t go on the it was not “meant to mean this” because what is written is what it means.
-11 builds appear to be good
Mar 3rd
Testing on a Ubuntu virtual box and a cleaned out Debain box appears to install correctly. So I am really praying this time that its all good, feed back please from anyone else who can confirm its now working, thanks!
-11 builds *sigh* on their way
Mar 2nd
I’m now building the -11 version for Debian as we speak, i’ve upset the Ubuntu users twice in two days, you Debian users must be feeling left out, so now its time for your upset too;-)
I’ve tested this clearing out by debconf databases and it still works, no missing entries (which is what was tripping the debs before) as i had not managed to copy the templates file into the DEBIAN/ binary staging area with the correct file name, it would run under test directly from the script (adding a entry to the database) then appear to work directly from the deb. Clearing the debconf database repro’d the issue for me on -10. Also did a complete package build and install and still was good so its been sent to the autobuilder for Debian, assuming this goes ok this time, i’ll fire ubuntu builds to launchpad in the morning now.
The Debian autobuilder is kind of slow, takes about 2.5 h for both i386 and amd64 and upload to apt.byteme.org.uk so i’ll go to bed and leave it running
Fail
Mar 2nd
The -10 builds are still faulty, despite me testing them on debian successfully the same bug is back. Ok please bear with us during this annoying transition.
New build on its way
Mar 2nd
Annoying as it is for a simple packaging mistake, i’ve identifed the cause of the -9 failure, the preinst.template file was missing one of its template entries causing install to abort. Just fired the new -10 deb to lauchpad, and will kick the local Debian autobuilder off in a moment as well…
Fingers crossed this time
Potential issues with postinst script
Mar 1st
I’m getting reports that the new preinst script is returning:-
error: E: /var/cache/apt/archives/snowglobe_1.3.1-9_amd64.deb: subprocess new pre-installation script returned error exit status 10
I’ll investigate and see whats up, probably will mean a new release again for a trivial packaging issue.
New builds finished
Feb 28th
The latest set of Debian and Ubuntu builds of Snowglobe are on the two apt repositories, I hope these are compliant with appropriate Linden Labs policy, it still remains to be seen if I can continue using the snowglobe name for the package, I’m not making any feature changes to the code and it is clearly identified that it is a third party build in multiple places. But LL might be really fussy about the usage of the snowglobe name.
We have been around this loop once already with the main viewer and remaining so I really hope we don’t have the entire firefox/iceweasle situation again here, I believe that having to call my package something other than snowglobe is fundamentally misleading for users as that is what you are getting.
I’m going to submit to the viewer registry as “omvviewer project”, if i can, I had a quick look at the forms for submission and they seem somewhat inappropriate for a repository based distribution system. I’m not linking to the direct binaries that is stupid, hopefully i can link to the Debian and Ubuntu download pages directly and then that provides users the information they require.
So all things considered, I’m going to push for a viewer registry entry very soon, and show some good faith despite the state of the TVP, which does seem to be getting a lot of LL attention and from the comments Soft has posted back to opensource-dev does look like its making forward progress.
Ubuntu builds reappearing
Feb 27th
launchpad’s build farm has processed the updated snowglobe package 1.3.1-9 and the i386 build is complete the amd64 build is currently in the build queue. I’ve re-enabled the Ubuntu download page, the Debian packages are building on my autobuilder but will also probably be another couple of hours
TVP updates
Feb 27th
Looks like very good progress has been made on the Third party Viewer Policy, a new faq is up http://wiki.secondlife.com/w/index.php?title=Linden_Lab_Official:Third_Party_Policy_and_Viewer_Directory_FAQ
Our builds here are progressing as well, i’ve made a number of cosmetic changes to address issues such as
- Displaying the appropriate messages to the user on first install as per the TVP
- custom channels
- custom branded window title
- custom information in Help->About window
- use of a different user location to ~/.secondlife to avoid _any_ possible damage conflict to an offical viewer
Git is upto date with these changes, and binaries and the reopening of the download pages should be fairly soon as time and testing permits.
Website updates
Feb 26th
The site will be in a state of transition for at least a few more days, I think i’ve beaten WordPress in to some kind of submission and now need to flesh out all the pages once more. Before I can let the download pages loose again I need to update the viewer packages to ensure that the Terms of Service are displayed to a user who has never logged on with this viewer before, I need to modify Help About a little too to make it clear that the builds here are not official Linden Labs builds, and I also need to add to the installer something that displays my privacy policy.
