On Wed, 11 Jul 2001, Daniel A. Koepke wrote:
>On Wed, 11 Jul 2001, George Greer wrote:
>
>> ..., I consider it rather rude to silently change the command that was
>> asked for.
>
>Isn't it rather rude to completely ignore the effect of the command, then?
The command worked...for 5 minutes. Options:
1) Silently change the command to memory.
2) Do the write to file, but not the memory. (current)
3) Same as #2, but warn the person.
4) Write to both file and memory.
5) Refuse to write to file while online.
6) Refuse, with override.
I don't like 1, that's not what they wanted. Number 3 is better than 2,
but still not exactly preferrable. Number 5 gets rather annoying (my peeve
that gets petted with Windows).[1] I'd go for 6.
> set file daniel gender f
Daniel is currently online, this will only last until autosave or logout.
Use "set force file" to really do it.
then:
> set daniel gender f
or
> set force file daniel gender f
It's analogous to the case of "fsck'ing a mounted filesystem." Our current
situation would be at the "happily screw up the mounted disk" stage.
>Perhaps we're coming at it from different angles, but it seems to me that
>if you type 'set file foo sex male' you intend to change foo's gender to
>male, and for the Mud to silently ignore you or even tell you that the
>change "probably" won't take effect is a bit silly. Does anyone use 'set
>file' with the intention that the change not be made if the person is
>online?
I suppose the argument is need. Do we need to? Is there ever a reason? I
subscribe to the "enough rope to hang yourself" philosophy because some day
someone will be more clever than we were. The mindset is tainted a bit by
writing on a paranoia-based, "everything will go wrong" sort of code but
it's still there.
Sort of like fsck on a file. Who'd want to fcsk a file anyway? They
probably just messed up typing, right? Until you have loopback mounts...
>Point being that if we ignore in_file, we're silently changing the
>command, true, but changing it so it has the desired effect, rather than
>have it say it's done something but not actually have any discernable
>effect.
To really throw a wrench in:
Why even have the distinction between file/game? Why not just
search for them online and set it there? Otherwise we set it in
file.
>I think it's a judgement call, though.
Moving from bad situation to bad situation isn't an improvement, so let's
pick a good one. Sort of like our act() replacement could never really be
good enough so we'll just keep it around until we think of something.
--
George Greer
greerga@circlemud.org
[1] - 1: "What do you mean I can't delete that file?" 2: (for NT) "What do
you mean 'Access Denied', I'm the administrator, kill that process!"
Sadly, the computer doesn't understand "Do it or I'll yank the power!"
as a threat, but at least it still works. Some people don't want the
computer to protect them from stupid mistakes because it's a great
learning experience if it goes wrong and useful if it goes right.
Just like _never_ use 'cp' to upgrade your C library. :)
--
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