Re: [SERVER] proposal for extensions.c

• Date: Tue, 23 Apr 1996 12:25:53 PDT
• From:
  Nick Ingolia <ningolia@neon.ci.lexington.ma.us>
• Cc: moo-cows@parc.xerox.com
• Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
• In-Reply-To: <9603210025.AA10987@saul1.u.washington.edu>

	The recent posts discussing a server version whose version string
indicated 2.2.3 (hacked) brought to mind an idea for a more formal method
of registering server extensions.  I realize that it will probably not be
incorporated in an official, Pavel release of the server, but if there
were a more formal way to register extensions, it might be helpful.  There
would be three parts to this extension registration:
1) A call to a function in the extension that would be responsible for
registering built-in functions for the extension module,
2) A string that would be printed in the server log on startup to indicate
the presence of the extension (which many extensions already do), and
3) A string (or pair of strings) that would be included in the list
returned by server_extensions().  This could look something like:

	{ {"DSA", "1.0"}, {"FUP", "1.2"}, ...}

This would allow server-hackers to easily document exactly what changes
had been made to a server, and extension users to tell what extensions
were operating on a given MOO.  It could also provide a friendly API for
registering built-ins, etc.  If there is significant interest in this, I
could write the interface and alter my DSA extensions to be compliant.
Ideally, this could reduce changes that need to be made when installing
extensions to (for example)

	register_extension(dsa_register, "(Using DSA v1.0)", "DSA",
"1.0");

--Nick Ingolia

ningolia@[oxygen|neon|stu].ci.lexington.ma.us
ingolia@molbio.mgh.harvard.edu

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