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<H1>[65] in Coldmud discussion meeting</H1></HEAD>
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<HR><H2>Coldmud 0.9 release, Cold World 0.4 release</H2>
<H3>daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Thu Nov 25 07:17:22 1993
)</H3>
<PRE>
From: ghudson@MIT.EDU
Date: Thu, 25 Nov 93 07:08:42 -0500
To: coldstuff@MIT.EDU


A friend of mine is working on a discuss gateway for the web;
hopefully I'll be able to make the archive for this mailing list
accessible via WWW soon.  If there's enough demand for it, I may also
be able to make it available via ftp.

I've released Coldmud 0.9 and Cold World 0.4 on ftp.ccs.neu.edu,
pub/mud/servers/coldmud.  I've also updated the postscript and info
(plain-text) documentation in that directory.

Please tell me about any problems in this release.  I have no plans
for changes to Coldmud before the 1.0 release, only bug-fixes.  I hope
to set up a permanent server on one of the SIPB office machines for
testing as soon as possible, and to release 1.0 sometime near the end
of winter vacation.

Release engineering is somewhat minimal; I ran the regression tests
under one platform (Ultrix).  I would appreciate it if people with
access to Unixware or Univel SysVr4 machines would verify that my
SysVr4 build instructions work for those architectures.

New in the Coldmud 0.9 release:

Doug Orleans kindly ran Coldmud through Purify, which found, in
addition to some minor uninitialized data errors that didn't seem to
be biting anyone, three serious memory leaks, two from startup code
and one run-time leak.  Correcting the leaks reduced the memory usage
of Cold World by about 33% under Ultrix.

I've also fixed the has_ancestor() bug in this release, and modified
shutdown() to flush write buffers on connections before quitting.

I've added match_regexp(), using Henry Spencer's regexp library.  I
cache regexps internally; although the caching isn't 100%, it should
be as efficient as manual compilation would be in almost all cases,
and is significantly more convenient than adding a new data type would
be.

I've changed the name of substring() to substr() for consistency.
People with existing databases should do a text dump and manually
substitute "substr(" for "substring(".  (You'll need to do a text dump
to upgrade anyway.)

Frob representations can now be lists instead dictionaries if desired;
this is somewhat more convenient for some frobs, and slightly faster.

I've added task_id(), which gets the ID of the current task.
connect() now passes the task id as the first argument with the
'connect' or 'failed' message sent to the receiver object; this will
be useful when I do task preemption..

The 'connect' message sent to bind() receiver objects now has two
arguments: the IP address of the remote host, and the port of the
connection on the remote host.  People with existing databases should
modify the connect method on $connection (or whatever you're calling
it) to accept two arguments.

New in the Cold Worlds 0.4 release:

Object initialization is done with no arguments.  This means that
objects' init methods must put them in a consistent state with no
initialization data, so you must have a canonical location for located
objects, a canonical source for exits, etc..  (I haven't actually
dealt with exits yet, as mentioned in the CHANGES file.)

There's protocol support on the root and system objects; see NOTES.
You should not have to hardcode dbrefs of core objects in your methods
for security reasons.

Enjoy.

--GBH

</PRE>
