Maybe I haven’t lost ALL control. But my inventory has. Not just my SL inventory. My opensim inventory is rapidly becoming a disaster as well. (Don’t look in my RL closets either.)
But this post is a serious plea for assistance. I am doing development in opensim. I have co-developers. We are all working on pieces of the whole. In our regular software development we use a version control system. We need something similar inworld with our prims. It doesn’t even have to be that complicated. We have very few prims and we simply want to remember which is the latest version. Does anyone out there know of something? Has anyone developed their own method that could be shared? We are constantly asking “WHICH one of these is the latest version???” We need to clean up our act. We know it can be done better. As I stood here looking at the boxes, trying to figure out which was the right version, the sun moved across the sky. HELP!!!!!! *watches as all the blue boxes fall on me*
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Ahuva's Blog 
For OpenSim it is possible to dump all in-world prims into an XML file from the server console. Worst case, you can check that XML file into source control.
A better case would be to find a way to tag prims you care about (e.g. with a Description tag), parse the object dump, and check them in individually. Even better if you made this part of a nightly batch process.
It’s a little more ugly if you want to get old objects back. There is a “read those XML files back in” command on the console, but I can’t remember exactly how it works. But if you can puzzle that out, then you could set it up to round-trip.
Someone who was good at OpenSim server plugins could probably even give you an in-world interface for it. Imagine being able to speak cvs commands, but instead of giving a file name to operate on, giving an asset #.
I’m still officeless and screwed when it comes to VW development, unfortunately. 😦
Hi Ahuva!
From the tech peasant here – any prim you take into inventory in SL shows an acquired time in its properties. This may not be detailed enough for you long-term, but might give you some help until you have a seriously complicated technical solution 🙂
@jaymin – thank you! i did indeed take your comments and talked to a friend about plugins. it’s something we will think about in the future and for long term.
@Calli – ah, you KNOW i thought this was wonderfully simple and easy to use – i said so inworld. but…. i’m told that there is no way to interrogate objects within inventory. and, when you rez an object, the acquired date does not show. now i have not fully investigated this to see if there is some ll function that can retrieve that date on a rezzed object. but it seems as if the acquired date will help us each within our OWN inventory (which is still a very useful thing) but not for sharing inventory.
thank you both so much for your help! i am moving forward. *grin*
There’s a “share with group” setting you can set on a prim (different from “deed to group”), that, I think, basically gives everyone in the group that the object is set to the ability to do everything that the owner can. (Or, knowing how these things work, almost everything that the owner can, with annoying and unpredictable exceptions.) Which might be useful for group building activities if everyone trusts each other.
For version control, I tend to include a date and/or version number in the names of objects under development; so “Orbital Mind Control Laser 20100419g”. You still end up with dozens or hundreds in inventory, but at least they all have slightly different names! 🙂
A real inworld version control system would be Teh Awesome…