Jump to content

LL Shutting down server development? JIRA changes ...


Nika Talaj
 Share

You are about to reply to a thread that has been inactive for 4216 days.

Please take a moment to consider if this thread is worth bumping.

Recommended Posts

So, we will no longer be able to search JIRA to find out if something we observe is a new, already-reported problem.  Or comment or contribute information to issues other people report.

We CAN search issues that, as of this day, are visible. I suppose that will be useful the next time the head-up-your-behind bug surfaces.

The only way I can make sense of this is if LL intends to never roll out any more new features.

Is that what's happening?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Replies 60
  • Created
  • Last Reply

Top Posters In This Topic

I don't think it makes sense even if LL never intends to roll out new features. As long as the system is under maintenance, they need a public repository of defects. 

It does, however, make sense if they are getting ready to quit working defects altogether.

Assuming they're not also planning to pull the plug on the platform any time soon, your suggestion Across The Street to set up a shadow bug-tracker for SL, run by residents, would be essential for any of us hoping to stick around.

I wonder if Cristiano could be enticed.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Firestorm already have their own jira, of course.

The only way I can make sense of this (for certain values of "make sense"), in the light of Nalate's and Inara Pey's reports about a more integrated approach to supporting TPVs is that, as part of this, LL have decided they might as well let Firestorm take over running the public jira fo them.

Link to comment
Share on other sites


Innula Zenovka wrote:

Firestorm already have their own jira, of course.

The only way I can make sense of this (for certain values of "make sense"), in the light of
and I
reports about a more integrated approach to supporting TPVs is that, as part of this, LL have decided they might as well let Firestorm take over running the public jira fo them.

Regardless of Viewer, there would still need to be a central repository for bug reports.

I do understand the problem with determining the source of the problem.  When Mesh went live and my FPS took a nose dive, because I was using Firestorm, that is where I posted my JIRA.  First thing they did was ask me to see if the problem occurred with the Official Viewer. I hadn't so I did.   Actually, it was worse. 

So  I filed a JIRA with LL.

 

(sadly, my issue is still not resolved :(  )

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

But, Innula, what about server-side problems?  I just cannot envision something like Pathfinding being rolled out without users being able to search for known problems, and disseminating that information through the various inworld groups to which we belong.  Heck, pathfinding products have yet to hit the market - even that feature is not fully rolled out.


I would think that if we're all utterly blind as to whether some anomaly we've observed is a known bug, it will result in more support calls.  And more people simply giving up SL when confronted with what turns out to be a transient issue.


I can see how the customer chatter on JIRA may waste developers'  time, but it was LL's decision to merge the customer issues JIRA with the development team's JIRA.  To deny users any visibility into known issues is inane.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

It doesn't make sense to not be able to add info when an issue is going on.  New users who try to find answers to their problems in LL official sources and fail will likely leave SL.  It is also a strongly chilling effect on anyone who might have been thinking of using SL to develop a new project.

Link to comment
Share on other sites


Nika Talaj wrote:

 

I would think that if we're all utterly blind as to whether some anomaly we've observed is a known bug, it will result in more support calls.  And more people simply giving up SL when confronted with what turns out to be a transient issue.

 

I cannot begin to count how many times I found a workaround in the JIRA. Like, if I am told I can't rez on my own land, point the camera at my feet. Lindens did not discover this -- as with so many issues, a team of resident commenters did.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I would like to add in my voice to those who are confused as to how this can be anything but a bad idea.


Only thing I can think of is that LL didn't feel the Jira was reflecting well on their public image (too many open bugs, or old problems that were never fixed) and decided it was better to hide the system then fix the system. This turtling is also visible by how we used to get blog posts explaining what happened when an outage happened and what they're doing to fix it, while now they're just saying they had some "unschedule maintenance" with absolutely no details.


No news is only good news when the news doesn't actually exist, not when it's censored.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

This entire situation...

I will speak clearly and frankly of my mind and observation.

This is another step in the wrong direction - we have a tremendous and diverse community that all visits SL, that works with the capabilities of it, and has for many years now.

Just black-boxing Second Life like this will end the community's ability to work with LL - and it is my observation that the team developing the viewer is NOT the team USING the viewer.

This is foolishness!

And there are a lot of things that can still be done, so many troubles and quirks that we can solve, together!

So, the latest answer is to just close down JIRA? Why? Webspace? Nothing good coming of actually fixing problems - and I don't just mean hippos, I mean REAL troubles. Exploits. Weak spots. Showstopping problems.

Turning your back on the thousands of capable eyes and hands and hearts that can and do work with Second Life every day, combing it finely - is the very height of foolishness. This move goes way past just sticking your head in the sand.

This is black-boxing the software. This is... closing the place up for development - let's see what the open-source licenses say about that.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

That's an interesting interpretation I hadn't thought of.


I saw it as just more removal of such vestiges of democracy as remain. They took out voting. Now they are taking out the very view of any and all JIRAs. You will only be able to see your own bug report, no one else's? That's absurd. That's not scientific. So much for "open" source?


It means all these people who become involved in the issues of the day are cut off. It's undemocratic. And I won't listen to any lectures about how software companies "don't have to be" democracies. They do, when they make social media, because they have people in it. We should be able to shape the world we pay for and inhabit virtually.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I think the Jira had become a bully's playground with more opinion, ranting and flaming than bug reporting or relevant information posting. It had degraded to the point where it failed to serve its originally intended purpose. No where in the blog posting does it say anything about shutting down server development ... that's just an example of the type of inflamed rhetoric that resulted in the change.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I agree that JIRA had much flaming, but visibility of bug reports such as SVC-8124 is incredibly important.  News of important bugs like that one disseminates rapidly through SL, and the knowledge alone can mitigate the effects of serious problems.  Workarounds that emerge in the bug comments also spread quickly for major issues.

I think the elimination of visibility and discussion will effectively shut down bug reporting by users.  LL must be aware of that likely outcome.  I've managed many software product releases, and would never have dared to ship product without provisions for user problem reporting.  Thus, my speculation that LL must be planning to ramp down releases of significant new functionality.  I don't think it's an unreasonable conclusion.

Of course, it's also possible that LL has direct contact with select users on whom it will rely for bug reporting.  Or perhaps they will plan for some sort of feedback during beta of new functionality.  But I see no mention of either in the blog posting.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

"I think the Jira had become a bully's playground with more opinion, ranting and flaming than bug reporting or relevant information posting. It had degraded to the point where it failed to serve its originally intended purpose. No where in the blog posting does it say anything about shutting down server development ... that's just an example of the type of inflamed rhetoric that resulted in the change."

Yeah. This. JIRA has been this way since day 1. It is an intellectual pissing contest more than it is a useful bug tracking tool. It's too complicated, and the signal to noise ratio makes it unusable and most off putting. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites


Zaphod Kotobide wrote:

"
I think the Jira had become a bully's playground with more opinion, ranting and flaming than bug reporting or relevant information posting. It had degraded to the point where it failed to serve its originally intended purpose. No where in the blog posting does it say anything about shutting down server development ... that's just an example of the type of inflamed rhetoric that resulted in the change."

Yeah. This. JIRA has been this way since day 1. It is an intellectual pissing contest more than it is a useful bug tracking tool. It's too complicated, and the signal to noise ratio makes it unusable and most off putting. 

As a scripter, I use the jira very frequently, to check, via the wiki, if a problem is with my code or with SL.   Obviously I'd rather bugs were fixed than not, but what's really important is that they're known and easily referenced, along with any available work-rounds.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

SVC-8124 is a good example.

Under the new JIRA system I doubt that there would be public knowledge of a problem which has severe effects on some users, and is effectively a DOS attack on any user who is standing in the wrong part of a region.

I just don't have confidence that the Labs has the ability to provide the help to customers, paying or otherwise, that the open access to the JIRA allowed us to provide for each other. OK, I could have missed it, but I never saw a Linden warning us to watch out for excessive bandwidth consumption.

And, for those who want to complain about the abuse and the ranting, this makes it even harder to deny the common accusation that Linden Labs doesn't listen and doesn't care.

Oskar is exceptional. But I wonder just how he going to be able to give useful information about the bug fixes working through the public Beta process. JIRA references are not yet worthless, because so many being fixed are old-JIRA. IF we cannot read the JIRA entry, which looks to be the new way, all those lists of numbers and titles will start to look pointless. It will depend on somebody geing able to create a JIRA entry with an informative title--possible, but rather unlikely.

It's also going to mess up the TPV community, making it harder to see which bugs are down to the Viewer, and which of those are being fixed by Linden Labs.

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

It is just LL's way of cleaning up the mess they allowed the JIRA to become over the years.

 

Reading some of the JIRA's is like reading a shouting match between 4 year olds rather than

an exchang of information about the problem.

 

Take something that was mostly useable and turn it into something that will now become

of no use to anyone seems like a plan formed by a group with a lot of infighting and no

leadership.

 

I had hopes that Rodvik would steer the drifting ship called SL a little better.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I have lots of problems with this change, some of which I've expressed, but there's something I haven't seen mentioned that I suspect is very dangerous, but I'm really not sure: security defects.

It's a dead certainty that some external, non-Linden platform will be used to exchange information about bugs that are found, going forward. One has already started (in forum format), because we simply cannot operate without that. The problem is, some subset of those bugs are security-related... and some subset of those are not obviously security-related--only a handful of Lindens may recognize how some bugs are vectors for serious exploits.

With the Jira, Lindens could just shuttle those bug reports off to the hidden SEC class. When (not "if") the jira is replaced by an external, non-Linden repository, those are going to be visible to everybody for all time, unless LL monitors that repository at least as closely as they did the Jira and convinces the owner to moderate-away the sensitive items.

In light of the current change, a repository owner will be very suspicious of any Lab requests, even if some poor Linden is tasked with watching that repository. Because the repository will be outside Linden control,  the ToS doesn't apply, so there's little reason to mind any Linden requests promptly--or at all, for that matter.

The unknowns: How many bugs have hidden security implications? And, once folks come to rely on the external repository exclusively, will they bother to omit even obvious security bugs?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

You are about to reply to a thread that has been inactive for 4216 days.

Please take a moment to consider if this thread is worth bumping.

Please sign in to comment

You will be able to leave a comment after signing in



Sign In Now
 Share


×
×
  • Create New...