LL to merchants: No TPV for you!

Yesterday, Linden Lab announced that merchants would be migrated to the new Viewer Managed marketplace beginning next Thursday, July 23, and that once migrated, merchants would need to use the Second Life VMM Viewer to manage their stores.

Never mind that the viewer is, as I write this, only a release candidate, not even in full release yet.

I've written before about the process we follow to keep our code up to speed with LL's. The main thing of interest here is that we need to do things in the same order as LL releases them, so as to keep merges from becoming an unmanageable mess. LL only released the prior merge, the series of attachment fixes known as Project Bigbear, this past Tuesday.

On top of that, the Lab insists that we not release code of theirs until it's at least at RC status. We can merge earlier if we wish - at our own risk. We did, actually; Ansariel Hiller has a repository she's been merging the VMM stuff into. Repeatedly. LL has, more than once in the process of VMM, reformatted the XML code that describes the user interface. Every one of those merges has been a major effort to clean up. When she complained, she was told "that's what you get for merging early". The clear message: don't merge things until they're RC.

So with all of this, we're just now getting to the point we can merge VMM into the mainline viewer. That's when we begin to make sure it fits in with the rest of the code, and find and fix bugs (often, LL's), and basically make sure it's up to our standards. Our release cycle takes a few weeks because we actually test things before turning them loose.

The upshot: We will not have a Firestorm release with VMM in time for our users who are being forced to migrate to VMM.

This is not a problem to LL, of course. As far as they're concerned, users should be on the official viewer, anyway.

To our users, however, it is a problem. LL has a terrible track record of listening to users, and it shows in their viewer. We're already starting to hear complaints from folks who want no part of the LL viewer. This thread on SLUniverse is typical.

Jessica Lyon posted late in that thread (as I write this) that we may release a preview viewer for merchants to use to do VMM while we rush through the QA cycle for the full release. This is a much less than ideal solution; previews are explicitly unsupported, may change, and aren't guaranteed to work properly. We don't like doing them. In this case, LL's ...planning may force our hand.

I don't know why LL feels compelled to force people into VMM while the viewer that's required to support it isn't even an official release yet. Whatever the reason, this seems like particularly poor planning, as well as a distinct "see figure 1" to TPV developers and users.

Sadly, it's in line with their normal ways of doing things, and what we've come to be used to.

Update, 18 July: According to this post on LL's forums, the VMM version of the official viewer won't be a full release by the 23rd either! Not only is this a "see figure 1" to TPV-using merchants, but merchants in general. The net effect, since Oz will not commit to releasing the VMM viewer next, is to force us to either push VMM as it stands now and deal with potential merge headaches should they decide to release something else first, or else hold off on our release and force users to use the LL viewer to manage their Marketplace items.

Real TPV- and merchant-friendly, LL...