Ask HN: Best way to use BitTorrent from Python
There are a couple of options for Python bindings to underlying C++ libraries like the pip package python-libtorrent. With python-libtorrent its hard to verify that the pip package is being maintained by people associated with the underlying project, and the project documentation give information about building the Python bindings but doesn’t link to the actual pip package. There is also the option of trying to use a project like Deluge as Python bindings for libtorrent. There also some Python implementations of BitTorrent like pythorrent but these don’t seem to be very mature. Currently I’m able to manage all of my dependencies using pip pretty seamlessly which has maintained portability and kept dependency management simple which I would like to keep true. I’d also preferably have good support for BitTorrent v2.
I don’t understand Python C-extensions and Python packaging well enough to fully understand the complexity and portability implications of using Python bindings to a C++ library (my understanding is that the C++ library is being compiled by setup.py during installation but I don’t know how error prone this is). I also don’t know enough about BitTorrent to understand what it means to use a purely Python library that isn’t widely used/tested. How big of a concert is security hardening with BitTorrent? Is BitTorrent v2 support that important? Any suggestions feedback appreciated!