BitTorrent support in Ubuntu

Tue Mar 4 04:12:31 UTC 2008

On Mon, 2008-03-03 at 21:58 -0500, Mackenzie Morgan wrote:
> A bunch of us argued for Deluge and were told we could install it
> after the fact if we wanted access to all those features, but that
> Transmission was chosen for simplicity.  Mentioning the number of
> features your program has makes your case harder to fight to get it
> included.

It's not so much the number of features your program has, it's more the
number of options your program exposes.  Compare Transmission's
preferences dialog to Deluge's - Transmission's is a single page which
captures (in my opinion) all of the useful options that Deluge exposes 6
tabs worth of pages plus one for the plugins, which then have their own
configuration pages.  The default Ubuntu applications should do what
they need to do with a clean, simple UI.  Deluge is undoubtedly more
featureful, but it does so at the expense of a complicated UI.  In my
opinion the extra features of Deluge aren't worth the trade-off for most
people - especially the people most likely to be using the default
applications.

> On Mon, Mar 3, 2008 at 9:53 PM, Alan McGovern
> <alan.mcgovern at gmail.com> wrote:
>         Hi,
>         
>         I'd just like to generate a bit of discussion on the choice of
>         Transmission as the default bittorrent client for Ubuntu.
>         First, i'm the developer of the C# based MonoTorrent library
>         (X11/MIT License), so I'm probably biased in my opinions as to
>         what client is best. The bittorent client i'd like to propose
>         is the GUI for MonoTorrent which was developed as part of the
>         google Summer of Code. My thoughts are laid out in my blog
>         (http://monotorrent.blogspot.com/2008/03/so-thought-struck-me.html) but i'll put the main text here for ease of reading.
>         
>         My angle is that MonoTorrent supports everything Transmission
>         does [b]and significantly more[/b]. Features such as the Fast
>         Peer Extensions, multi-tracker protocol and UDP Tracker
>         protocol are all great things for end users which MonoTorrent
>         supports (details linked in blog). The GUI has RSS
>         integration, cool tagging of downloads into groups, integrates
>         into the notification area and can monitor a directory to
>         automatically download new torrents which are placed there. It
>         also has a nice clean interface. Best of all, in the video[1],
>         which i encourage you to watch, it downloads a Ubuntu
>         torrent ;)
>         
>         One issue which i can think some people might raise is that of
>         memory consumption. All i can say is that i have done
>         extensive work on optimising MonoTorrent for both memory
>         consumption and CPU usage and am happy that it is pretty good.
>         Secondly - install size. The current packages i have for Suse
>         are ~380kB (~600kB installed). This can be reduced by at least
>         100kB as outlined in the blogpost.
>         
More likely people are going to ask "where is the Ubuntu package?",
closely followed by "where is the code?".  I presume you're talking
about the project associated with this website[1], but there didn't seem
to be any links to it from the blog you linked to.  There also doesn't
seem to be an actual release tarball on [1], either, which will make
people hesitant to package it in the first place.

The video looks kinda cool.  The tagging of torrents is neat.  I'd be
interested in seeing this in Ubuntu, but it doesn't look appealing to do
that yet - packagers _really like_ projects to have tarball releases
(with version numbers and logs of significant changes and all that jazz)
and definitely _bugtrackers that aren't forums_[2].  If you need a
bugtracker, somewhere to store tarball releases, and such, there's
always launchpad[3] :).

[1] http://monotorrent.com
[2] This seems to be a common feature of projects for which Windows is a
significant target.  I don't get it.
[3] http://launchpad.net
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