[Pan-users] Re: What's the status of new development?

[Duncan]

Darren Albers <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Sat, 02 Feb 2008
21:02:18 -0500:

> Charles is working on the Transmission bittorrent client writing the GTK
> GUI.   I suspect he needed a change but I hope he eventually comes back!

Ahh... so /that's/ what the Transmission BT client is, basically the GTK 
version of ktorrent (which is what I use).

I'm a newbie at torrenting, having just completed my third download some 
2 or 3 days ago.  I knew that Azureus was one of the more popular cross-
platform Java based clients, and I see a lot of uTorrent tho I'm not 
particularly sure what it is (I assume proprietary), but then I saw a 
decent amount of ktorrent, the KDE client I knew what was by virtue of 
using it, and transmission, and a few others, but I hadn't the foggiest 
what they were.  So it's nice to know -- and even know Charles is behind 
it! =8^)

So is he the primary/lead developer on it, too, or one of several?  I 
imagine a lot of what he's learned about the practical aspects on the 
networking side from pan help on transmission as well...

Is transmission as spartan as pan in terms of eye candy?  ktorrent is 
almost as fun to watch work, due to all the graphs and tables and etc, as 
it is to actually get the stuff downloaded.  I know klibido, the KDE 
binary news harvester/downloader, is similar -- lots and lots of eye 
candy, so it's lots of fun to watch it work, as compared to pan.  I used 
klibido for awhile before pan got truly automated multi-server, but when 
pan got it, I came back to it for binaries since I needed it for text 
(down and up) anyway, and I had used it for years so I was fairly used to 
its methods and idiosyncrasies. (Even tho the rewrite changed some of it, 
it works surprisingly similar, as Charles is still the author and his 
approach comes thru.)  But of course pan is fairly spartan in terms of 
eye candy -- no nice graphs of the connections to the various servers, 
and far less detail in the activity tables.  So I wonder if transmission 
is similarly spartan, but functional, in terms of eye candy.

But pan is almost the only gtk app I use -- it's certainly the only one I 
use anything like consistently, so I've thought about ditching it and 
going full KDE, thus being able to unmerge GTK and not have to worry 
about keeping it updated any longer (with Gentoo, updates are compiled, 
so it's a bit more hassle than simply updating a handful of binary 
packages).  However, knode, last I used it, sucked eggs, and I really 
doubt that has changed, and klibido... was new and very rough around the 
edges still last I used it, and only did binary downloads, and only saved 
files directly -- no downloading to cache, then working locally, as I do 
with pan.  However, it's been awhile in both cases, and I keep thinking 
maybe I'll get back to them and try again, one of these days.  Of course, 
it's hardly worth it ATM, since KDE 3.x is on the way out and 4.x, well, 
isn't a full solution yet.  For KDE 4.1, however, if it even still /has/ 
knode, I might try it out again, and see if at least the combo of knode 
and klibido would work in place of pan, thus possibly allowing me to get 
gtk off my system entirely.

Anyway, I do like the eye candy in ktorrent, and klibido too but it was 
limited in other ways, and having found out that transmission is gtk, I 
was just wondering how it compared, and how similar it was in spirit to 
pan, as well, given Charles' activity in both pan and transmission.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman