Mamnuts and PyTalker are dead, long live TZMud!

I had several choices, really. I could choose to undertake the huge task of fixing Mamnuts (actually throwing away most of the underlying NUTS-inherited code), but it was simply too much work. Or I could take PyTalker by the horns and just make its idea work - which had an estimated amount of man-hours quite inferior to the first option. But... what about maintaining and expanding it afterwords? One of the issues with PyTalker would be that, as soon as a working version was released, I would have to work on implementing each feature Mamnuts had, to be able to have a convincing argument against the usage of Mamnuts, leaving to the side the only unarguable preference: the common "but I prefer C to Python!" (and, really, there's lots of people saying that in the talkers world, imagine that!). I hoped to find a good team to do the job with me, but others would find even less time than me to dedicate to the job. It wouldn't work. Sigh. Well, I would have to do it by myself... with the use of nice Python frameworks. And, while looking at those and who contributed to what, I just saw that there was a third, quite more interesting option: get back to the origins - now without configurability limitations - and assume once and for all that a talker is a kind of MUD with certain particularities. And so, the best way to deal with my issue was, really, find out the best configurable, well-maintained, clean, active, secure, with a nice community MUD codebase, and try to just add the configurable options needed to turn a MUD codebase into a "MUD/Talker codebase", or, in fact, a MUD with a configuration option that would let you set it up to behave like your typical talker, with just something like

allow_utf8 = True
speechmode_default = True
talkmode = True

Now, guess what... that's exactly what you need to do to turn the MUD codebase "TZMud" into a talker. That's right: TZMud is a server to host a multi-user domain (MUD) in the tradition of LPMud, but implemented in the Python programming language, and, since it's 0.9 version, with a configurable option to turn it into a NUTS-like talker.

This is also, obviously, the time to say goodbye to PyTalker and Mamnuts. Don't be sad: you'll be probably able to find me lurking on the TZMud project. And, most importantly, if you're planning on running a talker (or running one already), switch to TZMud. It lacks lot's of features, that's for sure, but that is easily fixed: just open a ticket asking for what you're missing. Feel free to contribute with code, if you can, the project maintainers are quite open and happy to review/accept your code.

This is the last blog post on Mamnuts' website.

Python 3000

For those distracted, Python 3000 is out there [1]. I'm not really happy with all the changes [2], tho, but I guess I'll have to try it for a while and then take some conclusions... What turns me off the most is that the lack of retrocompatibility isn't small, I guess that there are more lines of code that must be changed than those that keep working...

[1] - http://python.org/download/releases/3.0/
[2] - http://docs.python.org/dev/3.0/whatsnew/3.0.html

You know you're getting old when...

You decide to do a small python script to do something you could do using find and pax.

import os
for file in os.listdir("."):
  if file.startswith("3.x"):
    os.rename(file,"x"+file[2:])

(This changes the filename of all files from the current directory from "3.x*" to "x*").