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| THE CONSTRUCT HAS NOT BEEN RELEASED FOR PUBLIC USE. THIS IS FOR DEVELOPERS AND DEMONSTRATION    |
| ONLY. IT IS NOT COMPLETE AND REQUIRES EXPERT KNOWLEDGE TO USE. YOU ARE STILL ENCOURAGED TO TRY  |
| THIS SOFTWARE AND HELP US, BUT IN AN EXPERIMENTAL SETTING ONLY.                                 |
|                                                                                                 |
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This — is The Construct

It all started in 1988 when Jarkko Oikarinen developed a free and open source server at the University of Oulu which facilitated real-time communication over the internet. Its derivatives have underpinned the major IRC networks for decades ever since.

Due to its age and stagnation since the mid-2000's, a growing number of proprietary cloud services have filled the vacuum of innovation. In 2014 a new approach was proposed to reinvigorate real-time communication for free and open source software: a federation of networks known as the matrix.

This is the Construct — the community's own Matrix server. It is designed to be fast and highly scalable, and to be developed by volunteer contributors over the internet. This mission strives to make the software easy to understand, modify, audit, and extend. It remains true to its roots with its modular design and having minimal requirements. Even though all of the old code has been rewritten, the same spirit and philosophy of its predecessors is still obvious throughout.

Matrix is about giving you control over your communication; Construct is about giving you control over Matrix. Whether you are optimizing the entire protocol or just filling a need only a few others might share: please support the project by contributing back.

Join us in #test:zemos.net / #zemos-test:matrix.org

Installation

Dependencies

• Boost library 1.66+
• RocksDB library 5.16.6.
• Sodium library for curve ed25519.
• OpenSSL library for HTTPS TLS / X.509.
• Magic library for MIME type recognition.

Optional

• zlib or lz4 or snappy database compressions.
• GraphicsMagick for media thumbnails.

Build tools

• GNU C++ compiler, automake, autoconf, autoconf2.13, autoconf-archive, libtool.

• A platform capable of loading dynamic shared objects at runtime is required.

DOWNLOAD

At this phase of development the best thing to do is pull the master branch and use the latest head.

The head of the master branch is consistent and should be safe to pull without checking out a release tag. When encountering a problem with the latest head on master that is when a release tag should be sought.

BUILD

Please follow the standalone build instructions in the next section until this notice is removed.

./autogen.sh
./configure
make
sudo make install

BUILD (standalone)

This section is intended to allow building with dependencies that have not made their way to mainstream systems. Important notes that may affect you:

• GCC: Ubuntu Xenial (16.04) users must use a PPA to obtain GCC-7 or greater; don't forget to export CXX=g++-7 before running ./configure on that system.

• Boost: The required version is available through apt as boost-all-dev on Ubuntu Cosmic (18.10). All earlier releases (including 18.04 LTS) can configure with --with-included-boost as instructed below.

• RocksDB: The required version is available through apt as librocksdb-dev on Ubuntu Disco (19.04). All earlier releases (including 18.04 LTS) can configure with --with-included-rocksdb as instructed below.

STANDALONE BUILD PROCEDURE

./autogen.sh
mkdir build

The install directory may be this or another place of your choosing. If you decide elsewhere, make sure to change the --prefix in the ./configure statement below.

./configure --prefix=$PWD/build --with-included-boost --with-included-rocksdb

The --with-included-* will fetch, configure and build the dependencies included as submodules.

make install

Additional documentation for building can be found in the BUILD addendum.

SETUP

See the SETUP instructions to run Construct for the first time.

TROUBLESHOOTING

See the TROUBLESHOOTING guide for solutions to possible problems.

Developers

Generate doxygen using /usr/bin/doxygen tools/doxygen.conf the target directory is doc/html. Browse to doc/html/index.html.

Plan

Roadmap for service

• Phase One: Matrix clients using HTTPS.
• Phase Two: Legacy IRC network TS6 protocol.
• Phase Three: Legacy IRC clients using RFC1459 / RFC2812 legacy grammars.

Roadmap for deployments

The deployment mode is a macro of configuration variables which tune the daemon for how it is being used. Modes mostly affect aspects of local clients.

• Personal: One or few users. Few default restrictions; higher log output.
• Company: Hundreds of users. Moderate default restrictions.
• Public: Thousands of users. Untrusting configuration defaults.

Roadmap for innovation

• Phase Zero: Core libircd: Utils; Modules; Contexts; JSON; Database; HTTP; etc...
• Phase One: Matrix Protocol: Core VM; Core modules; Protocol endpoints; etc...
• Phase Two: Construct Cluster: Kademlia sharding of events; Maymounkov's erasure codes.