tbaMUD Continued development of the CircleMUD core

As mentioned in the color codes thread, I'm in the process of merging an antique MUD codebase (originally Circle 3.0 bpl5, merged in stages up to bpl8 and then 3.1, but there's even some stuff that was originally written for a Diku Gamma MUD back in 1992 or so) up to 3.61.

One of the fortuitous side-effects of this is that a sizeable percentage of the 3.61 code gets an eyes-on code review and there's lots of tiny (and a few larger) things turning up.

What's your preferred route for receiving the candidate fixes? I think the best route that's easy for me would be to make the changes to 3.61, with notes of the rationale behind each, and email you a zip of src/ - you can then apply a three-way merge if things have changed substantially in the TOT. I could in theory work with the repository myself, but I use Mercurial at home and P4 at work and would prefer not to have to muddy my tiny brain with a third SCM unless I really have to :) .

However, that gives you everything in one batch and that might not be what you want; a simple enhancement to the process would be to split out any changes with nonlocal effects into separate zips, perhaps?

An alternative would be to generate the diffs for each individual change from Mercurial, if you want finer-grained changes? The Mercurial patch format is similar (but, as far as I'm aware, not identical) to diff output.

Or I could simply supply the text file describing each suggested change in detail.

Let me know what you think.
Cheers
Dave

This route works for me, if you send to I can go through it and update the svn with the changes since Rumble's relatively busy with finals at the moment.

Great, I might be able to get something to you in a few days.

Thanks for taking the time to help us improve TBA Dio. Thanks for the help Fiz.

No worries. Code that can't be sold wants to be shared :) .

Here's two questions worth asking before I make the changes:
- top_of_* seems to be inconsistently regarded as inclusive or exclusive. If I search for '< top_of' I get 28 matches; if I search for '<= top_of' I get 73. My understanding of the Circle codebase is that it should always be <=, is there any danger that that's changed in TBA? For an example, I first observed it in act.wizard.c, print_zone_to_buf().

- do you chaps have a philosophical objection to using const char * const to make global / local string arrays properly constant? For those not in the know, const char* string_array[] means an array of pointers to constant strings; while the strings can't be modified, the array of pointers can be. The extra const marks the array as constant too. It's not the prettiest thing in the world but it's safer, and for locally defined arrays, can be more efficient too since the array is less likely to be initialised on every function call. I've made this change in my code and it doesn't cause the code to catch a bad const-virus.

Well, that took longer than expected.

I've just sent a zip with a bit over 100 fixes to Fizban. A small number are genuinely important; a few are purely cosmetic, most are something in between, many of them are useful little things. Hopefully they'll all make the bar for acceptance. Let me know if anything in particular wants reworking.

Wow I'm very interested in this !

How's the merge coming on?

(I've about another 20 things ready to merge up once I've got the results)

Looking at the SVN log, it seems Fizban hasn't managed to submit any changes since you sent them on 22nd June, although Rumble has uploaded a few updates since then.
I also can update the SVN, so if you would like to send them to me too, I'll have a look at adding them. I can't seem to send you my email address in a PM, not sure if you have an email addy on your profile here...
Fiz, if you already have this covered, let me know...

I know Fizban must have made some progress because he pointed out a couple of minor errors in the Unix paths.

The sheer size of it may be slowing things up mind (in particular, breaking it down to individual changes for SVN may be non-trivial, which is what I was a bit worried about when we started this).

My email address appears in my preferences here... and I've obviously received all the sign-up emails.

Pretty sure this board's "PM" system just sends the message as an email anyways, doesn't it?

Yeah, it does, but without showing the recipient's email address. I'm always careful about putting my email address on forums where anyone can get hold of it.
Not everyone has PM's turned on in their profile though. When you click a person's name, some people (like ralgith, Rumble or me) have a 'Contact' link at the top, others (like Dio) don't have it.

Gotcha. Thanks for the clarification.

Ah, right. Turns out there was a box I needed to click. You should be able to see the contact button now.