[Lambdamoo-server] Greetings, and some patches

[Garance A D. <dr...@rp...>]

Hi.

I work at RPI in Troy NY.  Several RPI alumni have developed
a "chat" server called "lily", which is based on lambdaMOO.
LambdaMOO has worked fairly well for this, but we have made
a number of changes over the years, and I thought I should
try to feed some of those back into the lambdaMOO project.

I don't know how active the project is, but I did track
down this mailing list at sourceforge, so I thought I'd
join it and see who's listening.

We (lily-ites) are in the process of upgrading the moo
database we use to implement lily, and in the process I've
tracked down version 1.8.1 of lambdamoo, and have been
recreating our updates.  What should I do to get these
updates applied to the "official source"?

What I have done is created my own CVS repository based on
1.8.1 that I picked up from
    ftp://ftp.place.org/pub/moo/LambdaMOO-1.8.1.tar.gz
a few months ago.  I guess that's now also available from
sourceforge.net.  I then redid all our updates, and added
a few more.  (I'm developing on freebsd, if that makes a
difference.  I'm also a committer to the freebsd project,
although I mainly work on 'lpr' for that).  I might also
try to test these changes on openbsd, if I have enough time.

At the moment I don't remember all the updates I have
added to that base, but here's a few of them just to see
if I can stir up some interest in them:

  1) I fixed configure.in to work with the most recent
     version of autoconf.  This should get lambdamoo
     to compile on more platforms.
  2) I picked up the change someone wrote so 'moo'
     can accept ssl-ed connections.  I also changed
     configure.in so that the code is only compiled
     in for systems where 'openssl' is defined.  (the
     check that I used might only recognize openssl
     under freebsd).
  3) add support for 'kill -HUP' processing.  If a
     SIGHUP is received, and if the program was
     started with the -l (logfile) parameter, then
     moo will close and re-open the logfile.  Given
     that RPI's lily server has been up for over a
     year at a stretch, and it's used by a few
     hundred people, it was important that we could
     rotate the logfile!
  4) add a '-p' option to the command-line parameters.
     If specified, this will write the processID of
     the initial moo process to a file (which is
     based on the database name || ".pid").  This is
     useful for scripts which want to automatically
     rotate the logfile, so they know WHICH process
     to send the 'kill -HUP' to!
  5) when starting up 'moo' with many parameters,
     the processing in 'set_server_cmdline()' does
     not result in a pretty result in 'ps' (at least,
     not under freebsd 3).  I have an update which
     improves that.  It also stuffs the active
     database-name into the line that 'ps' will
     display, for the benefit of those who are
     running multiple lambdaMOO-based servers on
     the same machine.
  6) add a PROMPT_PREFIX option to options.h, which
     (if it is #defined) will allow a lambdaMOO
     service to send "prefix lines" (lines without
     a trailing '\n') to it's clients.
  7) add a PROGCMD_USEAT option to options.h, which
     (if it is defined) will cause '.program' to be
     '@program'.  A dumb name, but for lily's use
     we didn't want '.program', and I wanted to put
     this in as a compile-time option...  :-)
  9) added some braces to some if-commands to avoid
     warnings about "ambiguous 'else's".

I think that's pretty close to all of the interesting
updates, but I'd have to search thru the whole CVS
repository to know for sure, and I don't feel like
doing that right now.

Since we are still in the middle of this upgrade of
lily, there might be a few more updates which will
suggest themselves for lambdaMOO.

So, are these interesting?  if so, how should I make
the patches available.  (I'm not really familiar with
how projects are run on sourceforge, or even if there
were some other route to send changes for this project).
-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   ga...@ec...
Senior Systems Programmer           or  ga...@fr...
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  dr...@rp...