(Writing this here tentatively. If people think this is the wrong place for library feature requests I'll remove it - maybe to the SkotOS repo?)

SkotOS has XML support under skoot/usr/XML and skoot/usr/DTD. There are a number of cases where it would be more useful for human file authors to be able to write in JSON -- it's a much more popular format now than when SkotOS was created, and it's already part of the SkotOS ecosystem in places like thin-auth and Orchil.

A JSON parser/emitter, like the XML parser/emitter, would be really useful. It's not as clear that we need DTDs yet -- the JSON parser/emitter would definitely be useful without them.

I think JSON would be fantastic for settings - right now we have things like the instance file and the userdb file where the parsers are just not very good. The instance file's is so bad that it will pretty clearly get us into trouble before long. You couldn't add comments to it because a valid settings line in a comment would be accepted as real!

However, DGD has some unusual characteristics and adding JSON support isn't as easy in DGD as it would be in a language with simpler callout to system libraries. So somebody would need to actually write the JSON parser. Probably best to write it in a non-SkotOS-specific way.

Ideally, at least from my point of view, what I was hoping for most was to allow any other user to set up an interconnected fleet of servers that would let them run, in their own way, a functionally identical version of how skotos set up their own interconnected games, including a central auth server, separate games connected via the userapi -> userdb backend.

I had a plan for this but I burned out.

I guess time moves on and I fell behind.

I was just thinking that having a way to package DGD and SkotOS into a .deb might help increase the userbase.

I already pondered doing something similiar for DGD as a gentoo ebuild.

I've started working on this in dgd-tools. It would be really useful to have both DGD and Merry API docs that people could browse through without having to directly look through all the code.

As a fun side effect: there are some programming errors like not calling the create() of an object you inherit that could probably be caught this way!

If you start work on this, keep in mind that the Cloud Server's DGD parser is incomplete. For instance, it doesn't support the "[..]" everything-range. It also doesn't have any support for the preprocessor (#define, #include, etc.).

Merry might be easier: there's a full Merry parser in skoot/usr/SkotOS/grammar/merry.y and Merry doesn't support the preprocessor (I don't think.)

Sorry for falling behind with maintenance, RL has been cruel with multiple deaths in the family lately

However I discovered that the server hosting gables had run out of disk space which I found out when an attempt to perform a routine update started spamming me with "no space left" errors

A quick df confirmed the issue

I did an emergency delete of all snapshot backups from 2020 to free up some space, and I'm rerunning the maintenance script now from scratch

But be warned we may want to consider rethinking our backup strategy with automatic or periodic purges of old files and/or upgrading the VM's storage