Freeloader (Re: proposing a gnome bittorrent client)

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Sun, Feb 06, 2005 at 08:22:29PM -0800, grafton wrote:

> I'm not sure how set in stone the use of gnome bittorrent
> (gnome-bt.sf.net) is for the hoary release, but I figured I'd try anyway.

The situation is as follows:

- We've wanted a bittorrent GUI for some time
- gnome-btdownload seems to be actively maintained, and basically usable
- gnome-btdownload was already packaged, and ready to go into Ubuntu with
  essentially no additional integration work
- Feature freeze is two days away

> Recently, I caught up on the discussion of a the need for a BitTorrent
> client and started to write one myself. Realizing feature freeze is near I
> rushed my things together in a semi distributable form. I'm new to
> autotools, so please bear with me if things don't work for you.

This close to feature freeze, I don't think that we can sanely decide to
switch our default to an alternative which is newly released and still
requires packaging and integration work.

I do think that freeloader should be packaged and available in the Ubuntu
universe for folks to use, and after it has stabilized, we can re-evaluate
our choice of default for the next release (by which time we may have other
serious alternatives to evaluate as well).

-- 
 - mdz