[MUD-Dev] C&C and Event Rescheduling

[Miroslav Silovic]

> Is it really necessary to be this careful with code changes? To me, the
> are outside of the scenario, in that they are not directly visible to
> players, or to NPC's, etc. So, it doesn't really matter when code
> changes actually take place. If an administrator is doing code changes
> on a running system, it seems the desire is for those changes to take
> effect "whenever they get there", otherwise that administrator would
> have to take great care to put manual flags around everything, to block
> out uses while the changes are being made. Often, changes to code will
> need changes to more than one piece of code - do you want to add
> provisions for manual locking?

The problem is testing. If you're a wiz, it's very helpful if you can run
the code immediately, in real circumstances, and see if things are broken
and if the code does what you wanted. I suppose there might be other
schemes to accomplish this (apart from 'make it work /now/'). One I had
used for a long time on MOOs and in Cold is to clone the relevant objects,
descend a new hierarchy from them, and code on the clones. This actually
works for pretty large (but not massive) changes.

Perhaps it could be possible to mark a set of objects that define some
aspect of the mud, and then create automatic system that'd clone the
entire hierarchy and then track changes?

	Miro