[crossfire] Moving server towards a modularized system?

[Anton Oussik]

Throwing in my two pennies:

In general modularisiation of the code will improve maintainability,
as the core will be smaller, and tidier. Modules can then be compiled
in or left out as the person running the server wishes. This would
make debugging easier if anything, as then as long as the core is
stable (which should not be too hard if it is made small) it will be
always possible to isolate the modules that are causing trouble and
either fix them or not use them until they are made more stable.

On the other hand modularising the code will result in many changes,
may introduce new bugs into the code, and is in general a lot of work
whilst the benefits are questionable (this will only be useful if core
is really small and most things are out in modules which can be
configured at configure stage). If someone has a desire to do all that
they are welcome to (it is an open source project :-) ), but in my
opinion implementing new features would be more beneficial to the
project.

If you are going to go ahead with it, before you do anything to the
code you will need to define what goes out to what modules, and what
depends on what. Since CF was not designed to be modular you may also
find recursive dependancies which will need resolving first. But I
suspect you knew this already...