This is the Unix Hearse distribution.

Nethack sometimes saves the level on which you die (including your
stuff, what killed you, and your ghost) in a "bones file".  These files
get loaded into later Nethack games.  If you're the only Nethack player
on your system you'll only get bones files you created yourself.

With Hearse, you can automatically exchange bones files with other
Nethack players.  When run it uploads any new bones files it finds
on your system, then downloads any bones files the server feels like
giving it.  See http://www.argon.org/~roderick/hearse/ for more
information.

An important thing to note is that by default using Hearse will cause
you to end up with more bones than you otherwise would have.  This
changes the game's balance and is considered by many players to be a
mild form of cheating.  You can address this by turning on the
--delete-uploaded option, but the down side is you'll never encounter
your own bones files.

The change log is in debian/changelog.  Other than this you'll probably
want to ignore the contents of the debian subdirectory, it contains the
files which turn the distribution into a Debian package.

Prerequisites are:

    - the libwww-perl package
    - either Digest::MD5 or the older MD5 module

The program can be installed in the usual manner:

    perl Makefile.PL
    make install

See the man page for information about configuring hearse and setting it
up to run automatically.  You can run it from this directory as-is for
testing.  In this case you might like to use `perldoc ./hearse' or the
like to read the documentation.  There's a sample configuration file in
hearse.conf, but it isn't installed by "make install" (it isn't required
for hearse to run).


Roderick Schertler <roderick@argon.org>


Copyright (C) 2002 Roderick Schertler.  This program is free software;
you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU
General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation;
either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU
General Public License for more details.

For a copy of the GNU General Public License write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA

On Debian systems, the complete text of the GNU General Public License
can be found in `/usr/doc/copyright/GPL'.

$Id: README,v 1.4 2005/03/13 12:08:08 roderick Exp $
