bittorrent in core? what frontend?

[Luke Macken]

On Thu, Dec 15, 2005 at 04:12:03PM +0000, Paul Howarth wrote:
| Alexander Larsson wrote:
| >At some point in time we in the desktop group discussed shipping
| >bittorrent and a nice frontend in fedora core. Since more and more
| >people start to use this as a standard way of distributing software
| >(e.g. fedora core itself uses this) it really should be supported in a
| >default desktop install, so that when you click on a torrent file in the
| >browser something "nice" happens.
| >
| >What are peoples opinions on this?
| >
| >Another question is what frontend to use as a default. bittorrent itself
| >ships with a wxPython based frontend (bittorrent-gui, availible with
| >bittorrent in fedora extras). Another frontend is gnome-bt
| >(http://gnome-bt.sourceforge.net/) which is designed more like a simple
| >*.torrent mime handler rather than a full bittorrent app. Ubuntu
| >defaults to this i think.
| >
| >I packaged gnome-bt at:
| >http://people.redhat.com/alexl/files/gnome-bt-0.0.22-1.noarch.rpm
| >http://people.redhat.com/alexl/files/gnome-bt-0.0.22-1.src.rpm
| >
| >I don't use bittorrent all that much. What do people think about these
| >two frontends? Are there other interesting ones?
| 
| Upstream bittorrent stopped using wxPython at 3.90; the current -gui 
| package used in bittorrent 4.x is pygtk2-based and I don't see any 
| advantages that gnome-bt has over it personally.

+1

If any bittorrent client is to slip into core, my vote is for the
upstream default.

| I think the only viable alternative would be azureus really, which is 
| java-based.

Azureus is OK, but is a bit feature-bloated IMO for a pice of software
that just needs to manage downloads (I mean, seriously, do people really
need an IRC client built into their bittorrent client?).  I think that
the functionality of the standard upstream gui should satisfy all of our
core needs.

luke