Packaging Advice

General Advice

Other than to older branches which are still supported we generally do not provide non-security patch backports due to it requiring a significant amount of work on our behalf. Please try to avoid backporting patches by only shipping the latest version of InspIRCd wherever possible.

Make sure to pass the --distribution-label option with a label that uniquely identifies your specific package and package version (e.g. mewos3.14) to configure when building. This helps us identify distribution packaged versions when people ask for support. See our official RPM package sources for an example of how to use this.

Please don't ship preconfigured config files as they become outdated very quickly and result in us having to answer the same support questions over and over again. Our example files should be well documented enough for users to create their own config files.

If you are performing a system-wide install you should use the --system option. This will automatically the install paths for use in a system-wide install.

You will probably want to set INSPIRCD_DISABLE_RPATH=1 in the environment to avoid embedding runtime paths into the compiled binaries.

When performing a system-wide build you may be asked to specify a user and group to run as. If you want to run as another user or if your package management system automatically handles changing file permissions then you may want to pass one of the following flag options to ./configure.

# If always run as root.
./configure --gid 0 --uid 0 ...

# If running as another user.
./configure --gid $(id -g) --uid $(id -u) ...

# If you want to configure ownership yourself.
./configure --disable-ownership ...

Extra Modules

By default the extra modules for which the dependencies are installed are automatically enabled when you run ./configure. To override this you can pass --disable-auto-extras option to your initial ./configure run and then execute ./configure again with the --enable-extras option followed by a space delimited string of the list of modules you want to enable as shown below.

./configure --disable-auto-extras ...
./configure --enable-extras "ldap regex_posix sslrehashsignal"`

It is recommended that you ship as many extra modules as possible but due to GPLv2 conflicts not all modules can legally be shipped in binary form. Below is a list of the modules shipped with the latest version and their legal status.

Module Library License GPLv2 compatible?
argon2 libargon2 Apache 2.0 / CC0 Yes
geo_maxmind libmaxminddb Apache 2.0 No
ldap libldap2 BSD-style Yes
log_json yyjson / RapidJSON (deprecated) MIT Yes
log_syslog C stdlib Depends Maybe
mysql libmysqlclient GPLv2 Yes
pgsql libpq MIT Yes
regex_pcre2 libpcre2 BSD 3-Clause Yes
regex_posix C stdlib Depends Maybe
regex_re2 libre2 BSD 3-Clause Yes
regex_stdlib C++ stdlib Depends Maybe
sqlite3 libsqlite3 Public Domain Yes
ssl_gnutls libgnutls LGPL2.1+ Yes
ssl_openssl libcrypto libssl Custom / Apache 2.0 No
sslrehashsignal C stdlib Depends Maybe

Patches

Please don't make major changes to InspIRCd when packaging because it makes it really hard for us to handle support and tracing bugs. Distributions doing this in the past has led to them introducing security vulnerabilities which put users at risk for years.

If you have any minor patches which are relevant to people outside of your distribution then please upstream them. We are happy to receive and review patches that improve InspIRCd for everyone.