[PENNMUSH-ANNOUNCE] 1.7.7-patch14

[Alan Schwartz]

We're pleased to announce the release of PennMUSH 1.7.7p14. Both a 
patch and the tarball are available, but the patch is not included
with this message because it is large - nearly as large as the tarball.
Get either at http://ftp.pennmush.org/Source

The most significant change in this version is the introduction of the
chunk-based memory manager, and its most noticeable effect is that
infrequently-used attribute texts are now swapped to disk, reducing
overall memory use significantly (about 40% around here) with little
performance penalty. However, swapping does currently prevent forking
dumps from working (they'll be forced to nonforking) so if you've got
a lot of memory and you're really attached to forking dumps, be sure
you read the comment in mush.cnf about how to set the memory cache
large enough that swapping never happens.

Here is the rest of the changes in this release:

Version 1.7.7 patchlevel 14                     May 22, 2003

Major changes:
  * Ancestors: an object can be configured to serve as an 'ultimate 
    parent' of every room, exit, thing, or player, and attributes
    that are not found on an object or any of its parents may be inherited 
    from the ancestor for that object type.  The ORPHAN flag prevents 
    ancestors from being used on an object.  Patch by Walker at M*U*S*H.
  * Mail messages now track not only the dbref of the sender but the
    sender's creation time, so messages from dbrefs that have been
    nuked and recreated can be distinguished from messages from the 
    original sender. This modifies the maildb and make it not usable
    with older versions. All existing @mail is grandfathered in, and
    can't be tracked this way. Suggested by Philip Mak.
  * New chunk memory allocator can be used to greatly reduce process
    memory requirements by swapping little-used attribute texts out
    to disk and caching often-used attribute texts in memory. 
    This is incompatible with forking dumps, so if you use it,
    you'll do nonforking dumps.  Configurable in mush.cnf, see comments 
    there. [TAP]
  * Hardcode: new interaction type INTERACT_PRESENCE marks the
    arrival/departure/connection/disconnection/grows ears/loses ears
    messages. Many message types that used to be considered auditory
    (like most @verb-style messages) are now marked as visual instead.
Functions:
  * strreplace() works like replace() for strings. [SW]
  * fraction(), for turning floating-point numbers into fractions. [SW]
  * root(), for finding roots higher than the square root. [SW]
Minor changes: 
  * We now use wrapper functions atr_value and safe_atr_value instead of
    uncompress(AL_STR(...)) or safe_uncompress(AL_STR(...)), so we
    can do future work with attribute storage cleanly. [TAP]
  * @*payment attributes now receive the amount of money paid in
    as %0. Suggested by Sholevi and Time at M*U*S*H. [SW]
  * Config options that take times now accept a notation describing what kind
    of units to use. For example, 3600s, 60m, 30m1800s, and 1h all refer to 
    the same period of time. Suggested by Time at M*U*S*H. [SW]
  * Doxygen commenting of non-static members is essentially complete!
    Pennhacks see: http://www.pennmush.org/docs/1.7.7/html/
  * The mail() function no longer matches non-player objects by name.
  * Several additional messages (locks, parents, etc.) are now quieted by
    the QUIET flag. Patch by [EEH].
  * New config option default_home sets the room to send homeless things
    to. [TAP]
  * Added visual progress indicators for utils/mkcmds.sh so that slow
    systems won't think they're hung. Suggested by Cheetah at M*U*S*H.
Fixes:
  * Fixes from 1.7.6p10.
  * The 'i' sort type was not properly implemented. Reported by
    Noltar and BlaZE at M*U*S*H.
  * Cleanup of all accesses to ATTR values to use AL_STR() in preparation
    for future work on attribute storage. [TAP]
  * The 'any' string for specifying flag types didn't work properly.
    Reported by Krad at M*U*S*H.
  * The connect screen may now appear correctly under windows telnet. [SW]
  * The more efficient channel buffer shifting code now handles
    pathological cases correctly.
  * The tag*() functions could leave tags open at the end of full
    buffers. No longer.
  * Code cleanup in src/notify.c.
  * @rejectmotd and @wizmotd set the wrong messages. Report by
    Konstantine Shirow. [SW]
  * Using @chan/buffer to resize a recall buffer gives feedback. Reported by
    Sholevi at M*U*S*H. [SW] 
  * Help fix for grab() by Adu at AbryssMUSH.
  * You can no longer destroy the base_room (or default_home). Suggested
    by Philip Mak. [TAP]


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Javelin at M*U*S*H, once Paul at DuneMUSH | Alan Schwartz <dunemush at pennmush.org>
   (mush.pennmush.org 4201)         |      PennMUSH Server Maintainer
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   PennMUSH God's Guide: http://www.pennmush.org/~alansz/guide.html
        PennMUSH Source: http://ftp.pennmush.org/Source
     PennMUSH Community: http://community.pennmush.org
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