I'm interested in distributing my mud as it goes through its development phases. I want to make a clean BSD-style package that checks with a master server to keep up to date, but I don't know if it would be worth the time if most coders don't development under a system that would support such a thing.

Please note that this should be the platform that you compile under -- If you code with notepad and then upload to a Unix server, please select the "Remote unix server" option.

I vote for Linux!

A small notice for those who aren't very familiar with the IT world:

UNIX machines also includes UNIX derivatives, like Open/Free/NetBSD and the various Linux distributions.

O , I thought Linux was totaly differnt OS then Unix OS

I use Cygwin on my Windows machine and upload to a Linux box. I find this helps maintain not only some essence of cross-platform compatibility, but compiling the same code on multiple compilers also (IMO) provides better confidence for that code.

Kas.

While I use a local server to develop with, my local server also provides a CVS respository that myself and my other staff use to merge our changes together.

Would packaging take this sort of setup into account? I'm not familiar with BSD packages myself, but if there was some form of diff output it would be feasible to merge into a branch within the CVS respository?

Just a thought as CVS is something I like to use for most development projects.

Well, I've done Linux system administration for a good deal of time. I recently got a FreeBSD server, and instantly fell in love with the OS because of its package system. Basically, you have a "ports tree" which contains all the information you need to download and install a specific version of some program. If you wanted to install vim, you'd go into /usr/ports/editors/vim and enter "make install".

I wanted to do something similar. Instead of manually downloading a complete distribution, applying patches, etc., I was hoping to automate the entire process with a BSD-style script. The script would check its version number against the master's version, download and apply diffs as needed, and recompile whenever the user entered "make update". It could also check if the source tree doesn't exist at all, in which case it would simply download the latest version from the server. This way I could distribute the system by letting users download nothing but a tiny script. But of course such a system won't work if the development environment is Windows.

Trax: You could still use CVS, you'd just have to do an update after you run the script, to merge those changes into the repository. Once the format of the tree has been finalized, and I know there won't be any more database updates, I'll be moving most of this script over to use CVS.

Kas: Does cygwin come with 'ftp' and cvs support?

I develop under a Linux machine, then upload to my FreeBSD server. How different is the cygwin environment from a regular Linux environment, though?

Cygwin is a really well done emulation that ports quite alot of unix/linux functionality.

I've compiled, with slight changes sometimes, none the other, almost everything that I have downloaded and attempted to try. If you are running Win2k/NT you can start a service using cygwin that lets telnet, ftp, etc transparently, otherwise you probably have to keep a terminal open and run it as a background process. (You can find the link on how to do this at )

I actually ran X11 and WindowMaker under Cygwin just to see if it could be done. It seems well worked and pretty stable. Everything on it was ported with it, Odd huh, and it includes all the normal set of linux tools as well as a large selection of packages when you install it that you can choose (Apache, X11, ftp, Emacs, etc).

The manufacturer is Red Hat and it's freeware (commercial if you don't want to be limited to GPL). The site is:


Kaylus@Solice

I use cygwin and ssh to my machine (gryphonmud, linux) and do all my coding on there usually, occasionally I also work on my home desktop under linux, I find it makes the code a teeny bit more portable, gryphon has gcc-3.0.3 and my home machine has egcs-2.98-somethingorother.

How does BSD work for hosting muds anyway? When we where hosted on wolfpaw for awhile they where trying it out for a month, and I didn't like it at all, but I'm a linux/Solaris guy, so I didn't get a chance to get used to it.

kaylus: Thanks for the info.  I had no idea that the emulation was that comprehensive.  I should test it out one of these days...

Koryon: IMO, BSD works very well for mud hosting.  In addition to the added security and stability, the system is alot cleaner and handles multiple TCP streams incredibly well.  When I fired up an SSH tunnel to junkbuster on my old server, everything lagged -- muds and terminals alike.  With this OS, you hardly notice the difference.

Yui: Yes, cygwin comes with CVS. In fact, I've started using it on my pet projects just recently, for a bit of security. And yes, it comes with a pretty bog-standard ftp client.

Kas.

Great, thanks for the info!

A few things I learned from this: Cygwin is more heavily used than I'd originally thought, and it has all the tools necessary to implement the functions I need.

I'll be writing a prototype of this script and testing it out with cygwin.

Thanks for all your input =).

I actually found it incredibly easy *snix* to set up linux.

Take that last statement with a grain of salt. Before realizing that I was working with an unstable version, I spent a few months working around bugs and the fact that I was new to Linux.

However, with a stable version, and a little help from the internet, its relatively easy to set up linux on any old box. The new versions from Redhat practically do it all for you, and then all you need is your networking equipment.

I think thats why I see alot of people with their own server. Muds which have to share their space on a server maybe arent serious enough about what theyre doing (correct me if I'm wrong) because Linux gets easier as time goes by. Owning and sitting next to your server is ten times better then any of the other options, any day of the week, and youre talking to the owner of a server.

MSVC++ on Win95 and WinNT. Usually use Win2k for a server.

Once I grab a few spare computers, I'll probably throw some *nix on there for various server items.