| Posted by
| Conner
USA (381 posts) Bio
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| Message
| There are a myriad of ways that you can run secondary ports, the easiest is to just establish two identical muds running on different ports and use one as your public port and one as your development port. Some muds take it the next step and run three muds, one as a public port, one a builder port, and a third as a coding port. Personally I run two ports, a live and a development, but I use symbolic links for several directories and certain individual files between the two because they contain data that never changes on one without needing (in my estimation, for various reasons, some mechanical, some simply desirous) to be changed identically on the other.
Now, when you say mud file, I'm assuming here that you mean the executable in the source directory itself to which I'd say no, you absolutely do not want your source directory (or any of it's contents) to be shared any more than you'd want your area or builder or player directories shared between them otherwise changes you make on one are being made to the other and that removes the point of running a separate building port entirely. If you make a new mud directory and have everything else in it be symbolic links, don't let those four directories be.
Personally, the directories I feel safe to have as just symbolic links on my own development port include: boards, color, doc, & news (though you'll only have a news directory if you also choose to install one of the news snippets that uses it). Additionally, there are several individual files within the system directory that are just symbolic links on my development port as well. Finally, my Bugfixes.txt file in the main mud directory of my development port is also only a symbolic link because I see no reason to have a separate copy of it or the docs directory in my development port.
If you haven't gotten it yet, the bottom line is you can do it whatever way will work best for you, and there are many ways that you can do it. But you really don't want your players directory to be shared because you don't want regular players to log on to your development port to play, you don't want your areas or building diretories shared because you are trying to use the development port to build new things and test new areas before they're made live, and you don't want your src directory shared because if you add/remove/change something that crashes the mud, you want it to only affect your development mud.
Beyond that: I treat my clans, classes, councils, deities, mudprogs, & races as being the same as areas because new things within any of those have the potential for damage as easily as new areas.
I leave i3 and imc separate because too much of each needs to be different for things to work properly (well, really just the config files in each, but a few of the other files in each are not static files anyway).
I leave corpses and hotboot as seperate real directories because they only contain data when someone dies or a hotboot occurs and I'd rather avoid the possibility of data corruption for comingling that data.
The system directory is a touchy one, some files within that directory simply cannot be shared and some have no reason to be, while a few have no reason not to be.
The gods, log & watch directories just have no reason to be shared. One assumes that you have no reason to have the same imms on both ports if you've segregated all building to a separate port. Without the same people on both ports, it's unlikely that you'll be watching the same people on both ports or even necessarily have the same people doing the watching. Finally, if there's a problem on one of the mud ports, why make your life harder by having to figure out which log belongs to which port so you can find out what happened.
I hope some of this helps you.
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-=Conner=-
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