okay, disclaimer: i am not a professional programmer, i have little experience with C and have struggled somewhat to learn to utilize circle's functions and whatnot to modify mud behavior (to give an idea of my experience level.) hopefully my opinion is still valid, as i have a pretty big problem with this patch. using a stock code mud (ie, only modifying world files and such to customize - or not even that) is a joke. the norm has become to download the codebase and immediately patch several additions that the ftp site is just rife with. they're all good. plus, i have a real problem with people who complain that the unix patch command and the patchfiles they get off the site are incompatible with their codebase. granted, it'd be nice to automagically have things update themselves for you with basically zero time spent efforting them, but at the very LEAST these newbies should learn their way around the mud. but, for the people that do NOT have a stock code mud and do NOT want to do serious patchwork by hand, there are the bundles. Del's bundle comes to mind as one of the most outstanding collection of useful customizations to the codebase for the beginning mud entrepreneur. i beg you, don't underestimate the importance and usefulness of these head starts. how many times have we referred a newbie to a pre-built bundle? i'm not in charge of your guys' release cycle. but for crying out loud, even though we're still in this 3.0 beta stage, do we REALLY need to yank out code that invalidates the use of the majority of the serious patches for every previous release? i also don't know your timetable, but 4 months seems like a pathetically small amount of time to grant implementers to get with the program. i could be quite ignorant in my assumption that everyone's not up to date with the newest releases, but i know i'm not, and it's not laziness. it's justifying a huge huge huge change to the inner-workings of EXTREMELY frequently used functions that, yes, would probably make my life easier, but wouldn't for someone who's looking at an ftp site full of incompatible patches, or a mailing list with coders harumphing about the latest change. this is a biggie. and i think that while a lot of progress has been made in the 3.0 beta cycle, this would be detrimental to keeping everyone up to date with secure, stable muds. i guess i'm just not informed enough. but i've come to expect progress in the beta cycle in bits and pieces. this is probably better suited for the next point release. hope i haven't offended anyone, i really admire you guys. i'd hate to see something implemented that hurts more than it helps. Mark -- +---------------------------------------------------------------+ | FAQ: http://qsilver.queensu.ca/~fletchra/Circle/list-faq.html | | Archives: http://post.queensu.ca/listserv/wwwarch/circle.html | +---------------------------------------------------------------+
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