
What is IRCE?

  IRCE is a high performance, reliable and easy to install Internet Relay
  Chat (IRC) server implementation entirely based on the old server version
  stock-2.8.21. It was designed to be suitable for any size of network
  without need for manual tuning.

  It's intented to be compatible with 2.8.21 and 2.9.x server versions.
  (however, services and compressed links are currently unimplemented)

What do you need for configuring and building IRCE?

  First of all, you need a normal user account on UNIX box with a working
  C compiler and a shell enviroment. Second, you need the following shell
  commands in your path: umask, awk, sed, uname, whoami, echo, mkdir, cd,
  nslookup (not needed if you have a valid /etc/resolv.conf or domainname),
  printf and rm. All of these are standard UNIX commands and as long as
  they are found in your path everything should work.

How to build and install?

  Building and installing IRCE is intented to be easy. At first you need to
  run the configurator script called "config-irce" supplied with the package.
  You don't need to give it any parameters, just run ./config-irce from shell
  and wait for it to finish. If all went right it asks you to cd to an object
  directory in which you'll find the following files: Makefile, config.h,
  ircd.conf, and setup.h. All of these files should be fine by default but
  there might be a few things you might want to tune by hand.

  First, the Makefile and the destination directory where all the IRCE stuff
  will be installed. This is defined by the DEST variable. By default this
  is set to $HOME/ircd but any other directory where your account can write
  will do. Note that if you want to relocate the ircd directory in the future
  you need to recompile the server. All other variables guessed by the
  configurator script should be fine and work as they are.

  Second, the config.h and type of host. There are few exotic platforms that
  need manual defines but in most cases you can just skip these. There are
  also few options you should not touch (such as USE_VARARGS and DEBUGMODE)
  but all the others you can configure for your tastes. Note that if you want
  to change any of the config.h options in the future you need to recompile
  the server. For more information in tuning config.h see the INSTALL file.

  Third, the ircd.conf and the run time configuration. This is the main config
  file IRCE uses. Default configuration should be sufficient for getting the
  server up and running but you might want to use different P-line ports than
  the default ones which are 6667 and 6668. This is the minimal configuration.
  This file will be installed to the DEST directory defined in Makefile and is
  used on run time. For more information in tuning ircd.conf see the INSTALL
  file.

  And last, the setup.h which in most cases is better left untouched unless
  you really know UNIX systems like your own pockets.

  At this point you're ready to hit "make" from shell for building IRCE.
  This will take anything from 10 seconds to few minutes depending on the
  speed of your system so sit back and watch the show. You can generally
  ignore any warnings but if you see the compiling stop on any errors please
  mail your system description, Makefile, config.h, setup.h and the error
  output to the maintainer. (see the e-mail address at the end)

  If everything went ok you should be able to install everything with
  "make install" now and go to the DEST directory specified in Makefile
  and run IRCE by "./ircd".

  For more detailed documentation see INSTALL file supplied with this package.

Who put it all together and is responsible for IRCE portions of the code?

  IRCE is based on the old stock-2.8.21 server version and was developed by:

                 Ari Heikkinen <e-mail: aheikin@dlr.pspt.fi>

        (see doc/Authors for list of developers of non-IRCE versions)
      The latest version of IRCE can be obtained from anonymous ftp at:

                         ftp://dlr.pspt.fi/irce/

  If you have any questions, comments or ideas for later versions of IRCE
  feel free to drop me e-mail. Happy IRC'ing.. ;-)
