Notices

This comes from the long and actually relatively old now Transmission forum:

Interesting. Anybody has in mind to work on bringing Bittorrent to Fremantle?

A lightweight client very good in just a few use cases: responding to clicks in web pages, perhaps making search easy, perhaps making easy hosting seeds...

Very clever with power management and helping users to make the most of their wlan/data connections without making expensive mistakes.

Absolutely simple in the UI (yes, finger-friendly). Click link in web page, dialog appears, press ok. Search box, browser results, select. List of seeds with checkboxes for shareable/not shareable. Clear dialogs to define bandwith to share, policy for data connection, option for operate only when wlan is active and device is charging (e.g. while you sleep).

Oh, and imagine that lovely and cute desktop widget showing the % of the files you are downloading and giving access to the app itself.

What else? And how far would this be from what is available for the desktop or other mobile devices?

If someone is working in a similar line please share your thoughts. If you are good and determined you could even have a chance joining us in Copenhagen. There is also a GSoC aiming to integrate a Bittorrent plugin in Canola, perhaps that work could be reused? Nothing against Canola but it is possible that a lightweight Bittorrent client can have a demand in its own.

Torium is a good candidate - its based on libtorrent, has simple GUI and torrent properties are in a new window, so not taking up space. I tried porting it, but its based on Gtkmm and the Maemo 4 Gtkmm has quite a number of features removed for simplification, but they use them (mainly setters and getters), so it required quite a bit of work to get it in shape.

If Maemo 5 has Boost (or in repo) and Gtkmm is not simplified, then it would be a good candidate because of its simple GUI and good speed (which all libtorrent clients share, the others are Deluge and Flush, but they're bigger).

http://bithack.se/projects/torium/screenshots

I looked into porting Deluge, but it wouldn't even run in Easy-Debian, so didn't look much further into it.

It has a PyGTK UI, so it was something even I could handle, maybe I should revisit it...

Also wondering, does the current unofficial but reliable Qt support bring more potential candidates?

One question to BrentDC and other porters. Have you tried contacting the upstream developers? For support and help, or even only to let them know that there is some interest in having a version for Maemo.

Are you kidding ? Qt sports a torrent client as an official example for networking code.

http://doc.trolltech.com/4.5/network-torrent.html

Now you have just discovered how far my skills go developing networking code with Qt.

Ooops Don't get me wrong, that example is not the most optimized or feature packed torrent client out there, but it does work and it should be a near-zero effort to get it working on Fremantle, well, maybe except for some finger UI mods.

Did I mention I like Qt a lot ?

If you want more firepower, you have qBittorent at http://qbittorrent.sourceforge.net/ but that will mean a lot more customizing.

On a side note - my guess is that torrent clients will never be really battery friendly, with so many network connections something is always 'happening'.

I still think Deluge is the way to go; even the screenshots on the homepage are roughly 800x480 (http://dev.deluge-torrent.org/wiki/Screenshots).

Once you reparent the menu and hide the toolbar it will be almost perfect.

And since the UI is already fairly customizable (you can choose to hide/show most things) not much work should need to be done in that respect.

The only thing that concerns me is: Dependencies (haven't checked into them all yet to see if they're available) and memory usage (seems to be a little high).

No, I've never contacted any upstream developers about ports in the past.