[MUD-Dev] Collecting ideas for a MUD server... (fwd)

[J C Lawrence]

On Wed, 22 Dec 1999 21:45:07 -0500 (EST) 
Rahul Sinha <rsinha at glue.umd.edu> wrote:

> On Wed, 22 Dec 1999, Wesley W. Terpstra wrote:

>>>> Our plans...
...

Writing as list owner:  

  Please make sure you have all levels of quotes fully attributed.

No longer writing as list owner:

> you _can_ make it cross platform, GL is cross platofrm, the only
> platform dependant part is the DirectX stuff (iow the screen
> grabber) but that is not too hard to duplicate (directx for
> windows, DRI for Xwindows, and the equivalent that I am sure
> exists for BeOS and Macs)

You might want to spend some thought on what you are losing in the
inability (comparitively) to do:

  $ ./configure && make && make install

as the basic operation of porting your code to a new platform.
Autoconf is incredibly ugly, but it does work.  Sorta.

> oh and the .so model is also being used for rooms; you odnt HAVE
> to have a .so per room (that woudl be heinous) but can
> transparently add them, such that you can have a house somewhere
> that does all sorts of logic outside of the mud itself.  Allowing
> hooks to outside logic gives total configurability and control of
> the mud (asuming you can also reach into the mud to change any
> data value, which is what the perl module is for)

Have you considered the data and logical security implications of
this approach?  What is to prevent such user-written code from being 
either broken or malicious and 

  a) trashing your running server
  b) corrupting your server's heap
  c) corrupting your DB
or
  d) simply crashing?

You have inherently lost any layering or sandbox protection between
your user programmers and your system code.

--
J C Lawrence                                 Home: claw at kanga.nu
----------(*)                              Other: coder at kanga.nu
--=| A man is as sane as he is dangerous to his environment |=--


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