[MUD-Dev] Re: MUD Admin skills

[Hal Black]

On Mon, Jan 25, 1999 at 07:24:22PM -0800, Caliban Tiresias Darklock wrote:
> On 04:04 PM 1/25/99 -0600, I personally witnessed Holly Sommer jumping up
> to say:
> >
> >But, being able to manage your own code is an IMPERATIVE part of running 
> >the game! 
> 
> You still can. You just don't have to mess around for three weeks trying to
> get the server to compile. The sysadmin does the initial build, and then
> you're on your own. But at least you know all the variables and paths in
> the makefile are correct, which is certainly a non-trivial benefit.

I agree, also, certain platforms have quirks in the C compiler and runtime
environment that the system operator will know much more about than the MUD
administrator.  Indeed, it could be argued that the mud admin shouldn't have
to suffer through a lot of these porting details.  And if the mud admin
does need to make low-level modifications to the code, it's a lot easier to
figure out and work around these issues when you've seen it done once and have
somewhere from which to start.
  Like at work today, I spent a couple of hours discovering that MS Visual C++
assumes stdin to be a text file by default (and therefore stops reading when
it gets 0x1a character).  This can make a mess when trying to port code that
uses pipes to transfer binary data.  While I accept that there will always be
incompatibilities between platforms, this is not the kind of thing I'd want
to deal with if I were trying to run a mud; I'd rather let an expert on that
specific system deal with the gory system-specific details and let me
concentrate my efforts on writing the game.