[DGD] Where did all the players go?

[Felix A. Croes]

DGD's development has always depended on user feedback.  In its heyday,
50% or more of bugreports and feature requests/suggestions came from users,
with the remainder coming from myself and from muds that I was associated
with.  Right now, that is less than 5%.

One obvious reason is that users tend pick a version of DGD that works
well enough for them, and then don't upgrade.  DGD is quite stable in
its core feature set, so these users provide almost no feedback; more
recent features are not picked up and go untested.

This could be solved by releasing DGD as a package, which is kept up-
to-date along with the remainder of the system.  But I think most people
want DGD + a mudlib, and a package manager is a poor match for a mud,
especially a persistent mud.

For this reason, my thoughts are turning instead to a Docker container.
The Docker image would provide a startup configuration for an "app",
that being DGD plus a mudlib.  Inside the container, DGD would be
kept up-to-date automatically without downtime using hotbooting.
The same could be done for the mudlib, although this would be more
tricky since local modifications would have to be handled somehow.

Forcing Docker containers onto existing users is obviously nog going
to work, but I'm looking at using this setup for the AC server.

Regards,
Felix Croes