Baretorrent: minimalist open-source Bittorrent client
baretorrent.org
baretorrent.org
Then it starts adding features. Then it starts getting big. Then somebody starts offering enough ad money that maybe the idea of a tiny little banner ad isn't such a bad idea after all. Then a few years go by, somebody discovers a rootkit in the installer for the 300mb version 4.2.1.12, and gets annoyed enough to once again implement the protocol in 22kb, name it "scrunchyTorrent" and release it.
It's quite fascinating.
We needs more developers to help optimize the libtorrent library so it can download as fast as utorrent and help fix some of the core bugs and memory leaks. In addition, there is still no open source replacement for Bittorrent Sync or streaming torrents. Yes, some clients allow sequential downloading, but this is bad for the health of the swarm.
Like most open source projects, it's easy to find GUI developers and hard to find volunteers to work on the difficult problems.
> This is an interesting space to watch. Over the years, we've seen the cycle happen half a dozen times
This is not specific to torrent clients. Feature-creep is common. Since this was posted to HN, there's been a couple of posts of the baretorrent forums (and I've received a few emails) about feature requests. Software does not necessarily get bloated because developers keep coming up with new ideas, it's mostly because every user wants something more.
Saying no pisses people off, but I'm hoping I can move most of the requests over to extensions.
> Then somebody starts offering enough ad money that maybe the idea of a tiny little banner ad isn't such a bad idea after all.
Don't worry, I'll tag the source just before that happens so someone sane can fork it.
[edit: also, I'm really sad that I didn't think of "scrunchyTorrent" before]
I can manage the downloads from any internet capable device from basically anywhere.
Adding CouchPotato[2] and a branch of SickBeard[3] to the mix make it brilliantly easy to download just about anything, automatically, without searching for anything other than the specific title that I'm looking for.
[0] http://www.transmissionbt.com/
[0]: http://www.transmissionbt.com/images/screenshots/Mac-Large.p...
For downloading automation, I use FlexGet (http://flexget.com/).
Edit: It seems there is an unofficial Windows port that has been described as both 'buggy' and 'quite stable'.
NB: New major release which fixes most of Raspberry Pi issues is scheduled for tonight.
-Chrome plugin on my main computer + webUI on other computers (or for additional commands)
-Transdroid Android client on my Nexus phone and tablet
Almost perfect (almost because sometimes there are some minor glitches)
To accomplish this with baretorrent or other simple gui client, you have to run it in some vm or make it accessible with remote desktop/X windows. Even then, there is no facility (which Deluge does provide) to click a torrent link in your local browser and have it initiate a download on your remote server-instance.
For a real barebones non-gui option, rtorrent tui client with tmux detachable text session is quite workable even though it too lacks the advanced features provided by Deluge.
EDIT: Baretorrent does offer an extension that allows you to remotely add a torrent, but doesn't give you a full local client as Deluge does.
I prefer aria2c for this. Much more agile than rtorrent or deluge-cli if you like the terminal. You can have one instance of the app per torrent, each in its own screen or tmux and it's up-to-date regarding torrent protocol. It also supports RPC but the few webUI I found aren't really good. I was using solely that until I needed to select a few files in a torrent that held thousands. The deluge GUI was more practical to do that.
edit: to be honest, one of the primary reason I drove off away from rtorrent was that I could never remember the key bindings correctly and setting a ratio per torrent to stop sharing wasn't possible easily.
And it's a lot easier to use than rtorrent that has some insane shortcuts you will never remember.
You don't even need tmux/screen as with rtorrent/aria2c, just connect with deluge-console whenever you want, it's deluge server that is doing everything in background.
Private trackers are the only reason why I am still using torrents as there are some super specialized small communities around that share otherwise incredibly difficult to get material.
Looking briefly at the code, it appears to be c++ (which is fine) -- but also entirely without tests? Or did I miss something?
> it appears to be c++ (which is fine)
It also supports python extensions.
> but also entirely without tests? Or did I miss something?
You did not, but I'm up to a point where this is becoming very difficult to manage without unit testing, and it slows down and reduces the quality of my releases. I'm actively using baretorrent on debian and developing it on windows, but my tests on osx are limited. It also became a complex system much quicker than I anticipated (like most systems do).
Automated tests will come soon.
Total Installed Size: 40.79 MiB
nope
There's problem with less well-known client is that private trackers may not allow them which make it useless for users who use those trackers.
At least it's native instead of GTK. I'm not a osx user, although I understand the desire to have pretty and consistent user interfaces. My problem is that I'm limited by what wxWidgets makes available on its cocoa port, and not all widgets are available. This is why the toolbar looks out of place.
As soon as wxWidgets gets more widgets, I'll make it look better.
> private trackers may not allow them
Yep, but that's a policy of private trackers, and not something I can easily overcome. I'm not sure whining in the public forums would give me anything except rants. The only way this can be fixed is by people using baretorrent and asking their favorite private tracker to support it.
Also has a nicer GUI as far as I'm concerned(although I no longer use the GUI frontend).
It's not clear form the site how this is different from any of the other gui based liborrent software such as qtorrent or halite. Does anyone know if this has any unique features?
The idea of a minimalist cross-platform and open source Bittorrent client is great though, I really wish there was some good alternative to replace uTorrent.
I'm opening a bug report for this. I didn't check 10.8 yet.
> Also the choice of wxWIdgets for a new app is quite unfortunate, I think Qt is generally easier to develop with and to make it work on different platforms.
wxWidgets is the only toolkit I know of that uses native widgets on all platforms. Other toolkits draw things manually, although some (such as Qt) are getting better at integrating with the graphics and metrics of individual platforms.
Using wxWidgets was a deliberate decision that I made early in the process.
No.
> Priorities?
Yes.
> There absolutely needs to be a features list on the homepage.
Will do.
If you see the changelog, feature creep already started.. Sorting, etc. all that could have been piped to a specialized program.
People never learn.