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

[darren]

On Sun, 3 Feb 2008 09:32:33 +0000 (UTC), Duncan <address@hidden>
wrote:
> 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
> 
> 
> 

>From what I understand Transmission was a Bittorrent client that was
primarily for the MAC.  It had a back-end that was OS independent but the
MAC GUI was MUCH more polished than the existing GTK gui.  Last year they
posted a request for a GTK developer to improve the existing GTK client and
Charles responded.   It has since improved dramatically.  Like you I don't
use Bittorrent too much but Transmission reached the point where Ubuntu
decided to use it as the default client in the next release so it must at
least be user-friendly.

As for how it looks I think it looks ALOT like Pan (Which is a plus for me
;-) ).  Here are some screenshots:
http://www.transmissionbt.com/screenshots.php

There are a number of "Neat" things in Transmission that I would like to
see in Pan such as encryption and bandwidth throttling so my hope is that
now that Transmission has reached 1.0 maybe Charles will return and add
those features to Pan.   Of course that is completely up to Charles but I
can hope  ;-).