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A New Process for Viewer Releases


Linden Lab

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We are making some improvements to how we release new Viewer features. Our goal is to accelerate the pace at which we bring new features and improvements to all Second Life users by removing what had previously been a bottleneck in our release process.

 

In a couple of weeks, we’re going to begin following a process similar to what we already do with the simulator. We’ll release more than one new version at the same time in parallel to subsets of users for final validation, and then promote the most important of the best of those to the default Release Viewer when that testing shows it to be ready.

 

In the past, we have used the 'Second Life Beta Viewer' channel for this final user validation, but because we had only one Beta channel, some features and fixes have been significantly delayed waiting for their 'turn' in the channel. We will now be able to put those Viewers in the regular Release channel to a smaller randomly chosen group, allowing us to test and release new features more quickly.

 

If a development project wants to put out an early version for testing prior to it being ready for the Release channel, a channel specific to that project (either 'Project <project>' for very early versions, or 'Beta <project>' for more mature ones) will be created, just like we do today. These will be shut down when the project is ready to move to final testing in the Release channel, and users in the early project test channels will automatically be upgraded to the corresponding Release candidate version.

 

Because several different beta Viewers will be tested concurrently in the Release channel, the ‘Second Life Beta Viewer’ channel will no longer be used; there will be a web page where users who want to try early versions can find them. The existing inworld 'Second Life Beta' group is not affected.

 

Following a similar process has enabled us to accelerate the pace at which we release improvements to the simulator, and we’re looking forward to using this new process to more quickly introduce new features to the Second Life Viewer.

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