[DGD]Persistence and Object Databases

[S. Foley]

Running a persistent/continuous mud makes issues that were once important 
incredibly vital.  One such issue is object leakage.  By that I mean objects 
that are out there floating around -- the kind of objects that would be 
clean_up()'d as it were under MudOS.  In a persistent mud, one can imagine 
all sorts of causes for this.

Now a well written object daemon will keep track of all objects and their 
various relationships (inherited by, inheriting, clone of, etc.).
At least in theory.  But the object register daemon, partly, duplicates 
information already contained in the dump and swap files.  That is to say 
the dump and swap files are the ultimate authority on what objects exist and 
their relationships to each other.

Now given the critical nature of this information--what objects exist, at 
least--it might be nice to have some redundancy.  Is there any way to get 
information directly from the ultimate authority (the dump and swap files) 
such that any discrepencies that might crop up between it and the lib side 
object register can be resolved from inside the lib?

Something like a kfun that returned a list of all existing objects?  Is 
there a way to use status() to do this? (I don't see it offhand).  I 
considered cycling through all existing files, but one can also envision 
discrepencies arising between the dump/swap files and the mudlib source 
code. (Someone moves/deletes a file shell side.)

How have other people addressed this issue?  Perhaps it's a non-issue?

--Steve Foley
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