[vos-d] avatars anyone?

[Karsten Otto]

Hello,

I am a bit confused about the way avatars are supposed to work. This  
seems to be handeled inconsistently across the VOS code. Maybe  
someone could explain the correct use to me.

The most simple case is mesh, which just creates a local vobject and  
tries to add this to the remote site sector. I believe this is maybe  
a remnant of happier ACL-free days, since inserting children is  
usually forbidden, and indeed fails when trying

$ ./mesh -a kao vip://interreality.org/world
permission to insert vip://alu.mi.fu-berlin.de:4231/kao denied

The most sophisticated (and working) avatar is that of Ter'angreal.  
It *requires* the remote sector to be a compound factory, and uses  
this to create remote puppet avatar. The step of inserting the avatar  
into the sector seems to be unnecessary, apparenty the factory  
already does it (?), however the avatar code has a failsafe (?) for  
this:

avatar.cc:420
     try {
         avatar->findParent(sector);
     } catch(NoSuchObjectError) {
         sector->insertChild(-1, getNick(), avatar);
         goToViewpoint("default-viewpoint");
     }

What does Ter'angreal do when the remote sector is not a compound  
factory? Use a local pseudo-avatar? Try to construct it manually?

Another point that confuses me here is the fact that the puppet  
avatar does not have a misc:nick property at the beginning, but this  
is added only when setNick() is called. Is it really such a good idea  
to expect the remote (proxy) vobjects to fix the local vobjects  
infrastructure? IMHO such "intrinsic" properties should be added on  
local creation...
Otherwise, access control will either hinder this kind of repair, or  
must be set to be wide open and thus becomes useless. In any case,  
this seems to me like a rather strange behavior, a bit like saying,  
"Sure, I have a phone, you can call me, but you have to erect some  
phone masts and lay some wires first"... But changing this is  
probably something for 0.24.

Regards,
Karsten Otto (kao)