The Scope of Work should be decided upon at an early stage, to prevent unnecesary work, and duplication of work.

What should be in, what should be out?

Here are a few topics that I am unclear about:

1. Terrains: should we provide some tutorials on the creation of terrains, or should the manual be about getting opensim up and running, and leave content creation and the aethetics of opensim to the user? For my part, I would like to write some tutorials on this.

2. Money: should the module that comes with the wiredux be described, or not? Have a look at the tutorial I did on this on nthe blog: http://chapter-and-metaverse.blogspot.com/2008/12/11-using-money-in-opensim.html  it has all the normal health warnings. For my part, i am easy on this one.

3. Should delving into the database be discussed, or not? Should we provide some useful queries, for example:

a. What prims have been added to a <region> and/or <grid> since <date>

b. What inventory has been added to <user>/<all users> since <date>

c. What prims have been deleted since <date> and which <user> deleted them

d. What assets belong to a <region> that no longer exists

e. What assets belong to a <user> who no longer exists

f. Delete <user> and all their assets and associations (membership of groups, friends' lists)

g. Delete <user> and transfer all their assets to <user>

h. List all scripts in a <region>/<grid>, their containing <prim> and their <location>

i. Last time <user> logged on

For my part I would love to see a Chapter on database manipulation, including backups, checking, repair, optimization, moving, queries, etc. I use Toad and phpMyAdmin. What other tools are there for MySQL? What about SQLite tools? MSSQL? Is one definitive database going to be chosen at some point, and support for the others dropped?

4. Statistics and performance. This is a topic that gets raised quite often in the #opensim channel. Should we provide a chapter on server guidelines, and how the performance can be measured so a user can size to their own requirements? My feeling on this is that such a chapter is essential.

The draft manual I uploaded is there to help get the manual kick-started, so you can see at a glance what is already in, so you can see what what you think is missing, and add to the scope of work.

Once we get the Scope of Work clarified, we can list the topics in this forum, and then contributors can then volunteer to take on a topic and others can see what has been volunteered, and what remains, avoiding duplication.

At some point we need to decide on an Editor, to draw all the contributions together and make it cohesive, decide on a manual style, conventions, layout, and the rest of the metadata.

Rock