pircd - the perl irc daemon

4 years ago an IRC server written in perl was released on SourceForge called pircd. For those not familiar, pircd is an impressive piece of work with a modular design that's a joy to hack. There was some development and patches, a few alpha and beta versions, but the project has apparently stalled. If a few monks get busy on this project we can all look forward to the day when chanserv.pm, nickserv.pm and more grace the catacombs <g>.

Here's something the lead developer said last summer:

> I dunno, are there competent people out there interested in taking pircd
> to the next level? Does anybody care?

I'm of the opinion that people don't really care. (I'm also of the opinion that free software isn't the amazing development model everyone claims it is. But that is beyond the scope of this discussion.)

Sure pircd is a neat little toy, but it seems to be one that noone cares to help improve it. I do appreciate the emails I've gotten over the years from people who have used it successfully, but I appreciate the maybe one or two worthwhile patches I've received more than the lot of compliments.

As far as I'm concerned, pircd development is more or less halted unless I, or someone else has a revelation.

If someone would like to pick up development, be my guest. I'll hand over administrator privileges on the sourceforge project when I see a well written patch worthy of a new version number in and of itself.

From http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=1846230

--
perl -MO=Deparse -e"u j t S n a t o e h r , e p l r a h k c r e"

Comment on pircd - the perl irc daemon

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: pircd - the perl irc daemon by TVSET (Chaplain) on Dec 19, 2003 at 14:43 UTC
I'm of the opinion that people don't really care. (I'm also of the opinion that free software isn't the amazing development model everyone claims it is...SKIP... Sure pircd is a neat little toy, but it seems to be one that noone cares to help improve it. I do agree with Eric S. Raymond here, who said: "And this brings us to the first lesson: 1. Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch." (The Cathedral and the Bazaar) If you think about it, how many people do actually have a need in developing an IRC server in Perl? Firstly, there are not that many people that need an IRC daemon in the first place. Then, this number decreases with those who are satisfied by existing solutions. Further less with those people who don't know Perl or are cut off the development for any other reason. With all these in mind, it's actually surprising that there are any "Re:" subjects in that mailing list. :) Leonid Mamtchenkov aka TVSET	[reply]
Re: Re: pircd - the perl irc daemon by epoptai (Curate) on Dec 21, 2003 at 04:38 UTC
If you think about it, how many people do actually have a need in developing an IRC server in Perl? No need to think about it since I definitely need one, and I figure there must be few more out there among the monks and 1000 results on google for pircd. I needed a customized ircd and my only language skill up to the task is perl. This thing has allowed me to tweak and extend irc in ways that otherwise would be far beyond my reach. If not for this one project I'd be stuck. It would be a shame if this solution didn't continue to exist. perl -MO=Deparse -e"u j t S n a t o e h r , e p l r a h k c r e"	[reply]


The stupid question is the question not asked
	PerlMonks