I see. Thank you for answering fast even though I dig around in long gone threads.I'll try according to the wiki then.
Lets say I break my remote or find a better one. Can I recompile lirc as a single package and install on the router from an USB key or whatever using opkg? It would suck to have to recompile everything just to change the remote. I guess it shows on the tech level of my questions that I am a rather meek wizard when it comes to linux know-how and compiling in general.
Just for the record. ."/scripts/feeds/install lirc" did nothing. I had to manually download the zip archive from this thread with wget command and unzip it into my ~/openwrt/backfire/feeds/packages/libs/ for lirc to show up as a selectable item in the list in menuconfig. I'll check on fixing up the makefile now as I get some "this and that is undeclared"-errors when compiling.
When compiling it throws an error saying that EV_SYN and SYN_REPORT are undeclared. Googling those errors seems to point to some kind of kernel/patch issue. But none of the posts I find has anything to do about openwrt. Anyone else got those errors and might know how to avoid them?