OpenSimulator 0.7 released July 23, 2010
Posted by justincc in opensim, opensim-news, secondlife, virtual-environments, virtual-worlds.trackback
Hi folks. OpenSimulator 0.7 has now been released. There are considerable architectural changes between this release and 0.6.9, including major user database table changes, a new Hypergrid protocol version (1.5) and the consolidation of all grid services into one ROBUST grid server instance by default. Please see the release notes for more details.
When you run 0.7 for the first time with 0.6.9 databases the upgrade should be automatic but since this is a complicated procedure you will absolutely want to take database backups first. We also recommend that you don’t copy old configuration files since the absence of some new settings may cause problems. See the 0.7 upgrade notes for more details.
As always, OpenSim is an alpha level project, which means that there remain many, many bugs and various missing features.
Many, many thanks to Diva for very patiently managing this release and fixing a load of bugs on the way!
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Thank you for the updates.
–rjs
I’m really, really anxious to see 0.7 deployed on a large scale somewhere like OSgrid. There have been so many fixes, changes, and additions in 0.7 that I want to be able to see them in action for myself. But unlike most previous releases, I didn’t hear about 0.7 being used outside of smaller experimental setups. So I’m a little concerned about bugs with 0.7… more so than with previous version that saw use on a large scale while still under development. I do hope my worries are unfounded, though.
@rjs. Thanks.
@Marcus. I feel that the major issue with upgrading to 0.7 is that significant database changes are required. OpenSim performs these automatically so on smaller installations there won’t be any issues (hopefully!). But on larger installations, such as OSGrid, a lot more care is needed. Moreover, it would be extremely difficult to rollback the change and the nature of the changes mean that all region operators would need to upgrade to 0.7 at the same time. Hence, they have to be much more cautious about upgrades.
Therefore, I honestly don’t find the time lag particularly surprising.
@justincc: Nods, and I just want to clarify that I don’t mean to imply that the devs didn’t take care to test things. If they hadn’t, 0.7 might have been shoved out the door maybe sometime in May, and with nasty results. I’ve seen them catch nasties when reading the dev mailing list. So I’m not criticizing the amount of time taken, but rather lamenting the relative (and regrettably unavoidable) lack of deployment during development.