Version Control and History
In an effort to step up development and encourage community collaboration, I’ve invested considerable time combing through half a decade of archived preview releases and importing them accurately into a version-controlled repository complete with detailed commit logs.
I’m using Git for version control on the project from this point forward. The archive can be cloned anonymously from http://mudpy.org/git/mudpy if desired. For now, detailed commits can be E-mailed to fungi@yuggoth.org, but I’ll be setting up a developer mailing list for more open presentation and discussion of patches soon (and putting together a submission guideline document with additional, pertinent information).
I’ve set up a Gitweb interface to make the change history easier to browse. This can be found at http://mudpy.org/gitweb/mudpy/ (also linked from the documentation page). The interface should be fairly self-explanatory.
I’ve also started including a GNU-format ChangeLog file (linked from the documentation page as well), generated automatically from repository commit logs. It will be included in all future tarball/zip files, since these will begin to be exported automatically after each new commit.
UTF-8 Support
UTF-8 encoded input is now accepted from clients who negotiate the transmit binary Telnet option for sending, and UTF-8 output will be sent to any clients negotiating it for receiving (though clients should usually negotiate neither or both together). Most surveyed MUD clients have limited or no support at present, but this situation is slowly improving. In the meantime, rudimentary UTF-8/binary-mode Telnet documentation is being drafted to help simplify testing, and in hopes that this can serve as a reference implementation for other MUD clients and engines in the near future.
Clean-Up
Rather than keeping other improvements from going in while the new data format is under development, I’m treating that as a separate branch and continuing on the existing codebase in parallel for now. A new style guide has been added, and the code itself improved to meet it. Highlights:
- reformatted with three-space tabstops
- all lines wrapped to fewer than 80 characters
- modules imported within the objects requiring them
- replaced the previously included カタルシス // Katarsis data with a much smaller, simplified sample dataset
Improved License
The previous BSD-like mudpy license has been replaced with the one used by the OpenBSD project. It’s modeled after the Internet Software Consortium’s, a two-clause BSD license removing language made unnecessary by the Berne convention. This new license is functionally identical to the old one, just more terse and openly recognized.
While I was at it, I made sure to correct the copyright dates on some of the files in the current release and add a copyright statement to any files previously lacking one.
To Do List
In the interest of development process transparency (and also as a list of patch requests for anyone interested in pitching in), the mudpy to do list has been added to this site. In it you’ll find a (hopefully) up-to-date, if rather disorganized, list of things that need to be tackled in both the source code and sample data.