Frequently asked questions about the PennMUSH Server, post-pl10 Updated: November 11, 2002 *** There are other FAQs on the web at: *** http://www.pennmush.org/cgi-penn/fom/ *** http://services.pennmush.org/faq.html 0. What's the release history since 1.50pl10? 1. How do I ask for help with a problem? 2. How do I report a bug? 3. How do I request a new feature? 4. Where can I get more information about admin'ing and hacking MUSH? 5. Where can I hear about new releases? 6. Why doesn't %t or space() work right for Pueblo clients? 7. Compiling with the lcc compiler. 8. Patch information in @version and INFO ----------------------------- 0. What's the release history since 1.50pl10? PennMUSH 1.50pl10 is the last patchlevel of PennMUSH developed by Amberyl. Amberyl handed over the maintenance, development, and support of PennMUSH to Javelin/Paul (Alan Schwartz) after 1.50pl10. The first two post-pl10 releases were termed the "dune-1" and "dune-2" releases (in honor of DuneMUSH, where Alan did most of his development work). Amberyl and Javelin agreed that it was silly to start a whole new numbering scheme, so the next patchlevel released was pl11. Javelin, along with the other two PennMUSH developers, T. Alexander Popiel and Ralph Melton, made so many internal changes that it was time for a new numbering scheme, and PennMUSH was advanced to 1.6.x. Ralph Melton has since retired, and Thorvald Natvig took his place on the devteam. He rewrote the command parser, and PennMUSH was advanced to 1.7.0. Currently, the active development team is Javelin, Talek, and Raevnos. The stable version is 1.8.0, and the development version is 1.8.1. 1. How do I ask for help with a problem? Email to dunemush@pennmush.org When asking for help, please be as specific as you can about the problem. Include at least the following: - Version of PennMUSH including any official patches you've applied - Host machine brand (Sun, Dec, etc.), model (Sparcstation, etc.) - Operating system version (e.g., Ultrix 4.4) - Compiler used to compile (if a compilation problem) - A description of the problem: what you think it should be doing that it isn't. - If things were working, and you recently changed something and they're not working now, what did you change? 2. How do I report a bug? Email to pennmush-bugs@pennmush.org or visit http://www.pennmush.org/jitterbug/pennmush Include specific information as described in #3 above. If you know what's causing the bug, or how to fix it, or if you have a patch for the bug, send it along. If you don't, and the bug caused a crash with a core dump, you can send along a stack trace (see #6 if you don't know how to do this). Bugs are patched as quickly as possible. Patches for bugs are emailed to the pennmush@pennmush.org mailing list and to the pennmush-announce@pennmush.org mailing list (to subscribe, visit http://www.pennmush.org/mailman/listinfo) and are put on the pennmush ftp site, in the /pub/PennMUSH/Source directory. The pennmush-announce list distributes developer announcements only; the pennmush list also includes discussion. 3. How do I request a new feature? Email to pennmush-developers@pennmush.org No promises, but we try to get back to you about the feasibility of suggestions quickly, and implement them as we can. If I don't think it belongs in the distribution, I'll ask you to contact pennhack-volunteers@pennmush.org, a group of volunteer hackers who will custom-hack for your MUSH. If you're sure that what you need isn't of general interest, you can write to them directly. 4. Where can I get more information about admin'ing and hacking MUSH? Read Javelin's God for PennMUSH Gods, loads of info about setting up a MUSH, hacking source code, daily maintenance, and many tips from other Gods! By WWW: http://www.pennmush.org/~alansz/guide.html By ftp: ftp.pennmush.org, /pub/PennMUSH/Guide 5. Where can I hear about new releases? New releases of the PennMUSH code are announced on the PennMUSH and PennMUSH-Announce mailing lists (see above) and rec.games.mud.{tiny,admin,announce} Patches are only announced on the mailing lists, and are put on the ftp site. 6. Why doesn't %t or space() work right for Pueblo clients? Actually, it does. Pueblo is built around an HTML browser. In HTML, multiple whitespace is ignored and treated as a single space. This is correct behavior. In HTML, if you really want spaces to count as spaces, you must put your text in <PRE>..</PRE> blocks, e.g. tagwrap(PRE,this %t has %t tabs %t and spaces). 7. Compiling with the lcc compiler. lcc is a freely available C compiler described in the book _A Retargetable C Compiler: Design and Implementation_, by C.W. Fraser and D.R. Hanson, and is available from http://www.cs.princeton.edu/software/lcc/. A precompiled windows version is available. This might be of interest to people who want to compile Penn on Windows but don't want to download cygwin or another package with a Windows port of gcc. The lcc package might be a smaller download, but does lack some tools like sh that Configure and restart depend on, so you'll have to find them or try to figure out everything in config.h yourself. PennMUSH can be compiled using lcc, though it produces a lot of spurious warnings. After running Configure, make sure that HAS_STRDUP is commented out of config.h. lcc uses many of gcc's headers and libraries, so that this function might be detected, but it's never recognized by lcc. We'll just use our own implementation, as it makes things easier. 8. Patch information in @version and INFO Files in the pennmush/patches directory are checked to see if they look like a patch file, and if so, information from this is included in @version and INFO. So, what makes it look like a patch file? Two lines. # Patch name: Whatever # Patch version: Whichever Whatever and Whichever are used in the @version report. The file with this patch information is rebuilt when needed by running make.