Verse

This is the Verse protocol and sample server implementations.

For more information, see the Verse web site.

Building the Verse Core

Note: This section is only of interest to developers, who wish to build the Verse core themselves. If you have chosen a binary download, you will already have the server and can skip the rest of this section.

Running "make" here will build the API library, "libverse.a" (and its header file, "verse.h"). These two will then be used to build the reference Verse server binary, called "verse".

Starting the Server

The Verse server is a command-line program, without a graphical user interface. You simply start it, and it will immediately begin listening for incoming connections on a network socket. Here is how a typical invocation looks: 

~> verse

If you don't ask it to do otherwise, the Verse server will start listening for UDP packets on its default port. The port number currently used by Verse is 4950.

Note: This is not an official registered, port number. It is possible that it gets assigned to someone else, in case Verse will need to change.

You can use the following command line options to control the server's operation:

-port=N
Use the indicated port number, rather than the default.
-master=IP
Connect to a master server at address IP.
-Q
Don't register with a master server. This is currently the default, as master server operation has not been widely used.
-version
Prints the version string of the server to the terminal, and then exits (successfully). See below for information how the version string is constructed.

For example, here is how to start the server, with a master server of master.example.org, and a port number equal to 16333: 

~> ./server -master=master.example.org -port=16333

Options can occur in any order, with later options overriding earlier ones, in case of conflicts.

Release Labeling

Verse uses a simple two-level numbering scheme to identify releases. There is a "release number", and a "patch level" on each release. The intent is that within a release, the API does not change and neither should the network protocol. Between releases, we might improve the API which will require application programmers to update their code to stay in sync. We can do non-API-altering changes within a release by increasing the patch level, for bug fixing and other things.

The symbols V_RELEASE_NUMBER and V_RELEASE_PATCH are integer literals that hold the values for the API you have, and can be used (and displayed) in application source code as you see fit. There is also a string, V_RELEASE_LABEL, which is sometimes used.

To form a complete Verse version number, the above-mentioned symbols are to be combined like so: "r<V_RELEASE_NUMBER>p<V_RELEASE_PATCH><V_RELEASE_LABEL>". So, the following variable values:

Would generate the version string "r2p51foo".