Improved error reporting patch for BNC 2.9.4

BNC 2.9.4 is a simple open-source IRC proxy. Their website is down at the moment, but you can see a cached version.

I prefer it over more feature-rich proxies like psyBNC because it’s one-server-per-client model is a natural fit for mIRC‘s multi-server support. It also makes things a lot easier if you prefer to manage channels and servers at the client end (which, in my case, was running 24/7 anyway).

One thing I’m not so impressed by is the lack of proper error reporting. I have written a patch to make BNC return a descriptive error message to the client when a connection attempt fails: instead of “Failed Connection”, you now get “Failed Connection: <errno description>”. This should make debugging connection problems much easier. The patch also fixes a missing header dependency that prevents it from compiling under Mac OS X.