If you are wondering why Firestorm does not yet have materials and releases I expected didn’t make it out last week, it is the CHUI (Chat Hub UI). Getting the CHUI code from the Lab to work with the Firestorm code is a challenge. It took the Lab about a year, hearsay on my part, to get CHUI working in the SL Viewer.
The Firestorm team has only had the code a few weeks. The Lab keeps adding fixes and that is not likely to speed things up for the Firestorm team.
That CHUI is the hold up leads to the question, what does CHUI have to do with materials? Well, consider what Tonya Souther posted on SLUniverse, “The problem isn’t that the materials code depends on the CHUI code directly. The problem is that the merge process depends heavily on code changes being applied in the same order to the same files.
The CHUI changes hit a large part of the viewer codebase. (That’s why it took LL a year to get CHUI out the door.) Inevitably, those changes hit files that the materials project changed. When they do, if you don’t merge in the CHUI changes first, then you have to do a lot more work to fit the materials project changes into the code – work that you’ll have to undo when you finally get around to putting the CHUI changes in, or will have to do over and over if you ignore the CHUI changes altogether.”
They are down to about 20 merge issues. Then the team has to run it through QA. So, this may take longer than I anticipated… or not.
