Date: Tue Sep 18 19:25:01 2001
Subject: [DGD] Could it work...

On Wed, Sep 19, 2001 at 12:22:35AM +0100, mtaylor wrote:
> Me again I'm afraid,
> 
> My coding partner thinks that we can use what we need of the kernel lib to
> develop our own system. The good thing for us about doing that is that we
> will then understand what is going on.
> 
> Does anyone have the time (and/or patience) to list what it is the kernel
> lib does and very briefly how and why it does it.

Disclaimer: I doubt this list is complete.

The kernel-lib...

- provides the basic ability to add users, grant users access, grant
  users limited quota of objects, stack/ticks/callout-usage, to avoid
  someone going ahead and creating 60000 clones of some object and
  thereby taking the game down.

- provides the ability for external objects to 'hook' themselves into
  the /kernel/sys/driver.c object (and one or two other /kernel
  objects) so that you will be notified if an object is compiled,
  cloned, destructed, freed, inherited, a file #include'd, etc.

  This is where you would hook up an 'Object DB' that keeps track of
  the inheritance information so that you can write your own 'upgrade'
  command that recompiles whatever is necessary.  This is one of the
  things that is _not_ provided by the kernel-lib. :)

- provides a basic wiztool (with a very nice 'store results for reuse'
  approach).

- enforces that inheritables, clonables and 'other' code are in
  separate directories, 'lib/' subdirs for inherities, 'obj/' subdirs
  for clonables and, more recently, 'data/' subdirs for LWOs.

I'm sure there are other useful things but these are just some that
come to mind right now.

Hope this helps,

Erwin.
-- 
Erwin Harte