If you read back through MOO Talk, or MOO-Cows before it, you quickly see that sharing MOO code has historically been hard (a "fornicating pain in the donkey" as one user put it over a decade ago --
http://eli.elilabs.com/mcarc/08-96/msg00043.html -- and it hasn't improved since). IMHO this is a HUGE non-starter of a problem for the prospective adopters/users of Stunt and/or LambdaMOO. Today, people expect a decent ecosystem of third-party code to grow up around a technology, and they expect it to be relatively easy to use that code.
To address that gap, and in response to some prodding (thanks), I finally got around to documenting Composed (AKA $composed), the Stunt | Improvise package manager. Composed uses a neutral JSON-based package format for exchanging packages of objects/code. The current implementation has a few dependencies on Stunt's extensions (JSON support and maps) but it could be ported to plain LambdaMOO without too much pain. The code itself it almost two years old and very well tested (I use it to crank up a new custom core about twice a month).
Call to action: if you have code to share, or if you have time on your hands and are willing to package up some of the existing code out there, please consider throwing in and building some packages. I've already packaged up LambdaCore and several collections of existing code that depend on it (autoport tools, checkpointer and Martian's network/dns utilities) -- see
http://stunt.io/ for everything that's available.
Once packaged, users can install the code as easily as:
@install <package> with $composed
The package manager takes care of fixing object references, etc. etc. etc.
For details on packaging check out (hit me up with questions or problems):
For a long, drawn-out story about packaging up LambdaCore:
Some things that would be awesome to have packaged:
ANSI utilities
MCP
A decent web-server (Stunt | Improvise has one, but LambdaCore does not)
If someone felt like setting up an alternate package repo, that would be awesome, too!
Thanks in advance to anyone who's willing to help!
Todd