Damnit. I may be the only person I know that has trouble EVERY SINGLE TIME they update an existing Ubuntu installation. Earlier this week I did a dist-upgrade on the machine that I’ve been using to host my bots, naively believing all of the blogs I’d read gushing about how this new version was the "best evar" and how the update was so painless.
You’d think I would have learned by now. While this update didn’t completely hose my machine like previous updates have, it take a great deal of time and in the end left me with no way to run my bots from that machine. I don’t know at this point if the problem lies in the version of Mono (or if the Mono version was even different) or whether it’s a more fundamental problem, but this version has a SIGABRT from an issue somewhere in the appearance code.
The bots were working before I did the dist-upgrade, and were not working after, but I suppose it’s also remotely possible that the problem is related to Second Life® rather than Ubuntu. If that’s the case, I should be able to get the latest version of libsecondlife and ensure that the bots are using the latest SL™ protocols, but I REALLY hate to do that because the libsl guys have no idea of what it means to have a stable interface; They change the public API of the libsl code on a daily basis, and this makes it incredibly difficult and time-consuming for anyone to maintain a non-trivial project dependant on libsecondlife.
The libsl team have done a pretty fantastic job of putting together a codebase that you can use to build custom viewers, bots, SL™ <-> RL integration, etc, and are to be commended for all of their hard work, but I often get the feeling that the majority of contributors have not spent a lot of time deep in the trenches of a large commercial software project where different teams maintain different subsystems and critical libraries.
Okay, enough ranting for now. I had hoped to have the bots ready for public usage at the same time as the new C:SI update, and have been testing them in secret for the last several weeks on a few of the sims where my wife and I have large chunks of land, but this setback will most likely mean that the bots will be delayed.
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