I’ve been making fairly steady progress on the GUI client. The current svn code can now add torrents from either the GUI or a disk cache, remove them from the active context, and most importantly, upload and download them. It still has a number of rough edges, and the UI isn’t the most appealing one. However most of the behind-the-scenes code is in place.
Things still to implement before 0.0.5:
The fast resume code has proven stable over a number of torrents (>10Gb), so I’ve uploaded the code to the Sourceforge SVN repository, and released the library as 0.0.4. Take it for spin, and post feedback here or on the niagara-devel list.
I’ve been working slowly on the GUI client and the library. I’m currently on elective study in France, so things have been a bit slow. I have managed to add preliminary support for Fast Resume to the library, which will be available both in the command line and GUI clients.
The context created by the library stores the completion status of each tracked torrent, but this was not persistent between sessions. I’ve added support for saving and loading this between sessions. Hopefully this will make downloading large torrents more convenient.
I’ll upload it to SVN once I’ve tested it with a few more torrents, and look at releasing 0.0.4 shortly. Then I’ll be able to focus all my attention on the Cocoa client.
Though there’s nothing ready to release yet, I’ve made substantial progress with integrating the backend library into a GUI framework. The torrent data model is complete, and the libniagara port from libbt is functioning as a static library in Xcode. All that remains is to link the two so that the GUI can hand off torrents to the library. Once that’s done I’ll put out a 0.1 release and upload the code to SVN.
Keep an eye out, I should be ready to make an announcement on the niagara-devel list in the next fortnight or so.
Sorry for the hibernation, but final exams and Christmas got in the way of torrent-related exploits for the moment. If you want to check out the competition, the Fink project has added KTorrent to its list of ports. Few hours to compile, but well worth it for this competent client.
Picked this up today from the local Uni bookstore (Hurray for student discount!) to aid in fleshing out the Cocoa client, which may be a 0.0.4 release if I hack something basic together, or 0.1 if I’m happy with the basic feature set.
Anyway I’m only a few chapters in, but have learnt more about Xcode in an afternoon than in the last couple of months. Great reading, and I highly recommend picking up a copy if you want to do any kind of OS X development.
I’ve now fixed the TCP subsystem so it correctly binds the BSD listen socket to your external port. The default is 6881, or set a custom one with export NIAGARA_EXTPORT.
It would appear that the libbt 1.05 code I’ve been using as a basis for Niagara had the bind command which binds a BSD socket to an external listen port (essential for bittorrent) disabled, essentially firewalling the client. Oops…
The good news is that I’ve now debugged the issue and am prepping the 0.0.3 release to fix this. Should be up at Niagara’s sourceforge site in about 15 minutes.
Regards,
Ryan
Version 0.0.2 of Niagara has been released!
Currently only the command-line library is available. I’ve released
this as I’m happy with the current basic level of functionality
provided, and now want to spend some time implementing the Cocoa
client for OS X. Once this is moving ahead, I’ll get to work on DHT
and encryption.
Currently three command-line tools are available - btget (basic
torrent client), btlist (torrent and tracker metadata information
tool) and btcheck (checks a completed download for integrity). The
main improvement in this release is the use of Laurent Demailly’s
http_tiny library to add tracker scraping to btlist.
For more information see the README, CHANGELOG and man pages within
the archive.
Get it while it’s hot at Sourceforge.net.
Please direct feedback to the niagara-devel mailing list.
Regards,
Ryan