DHT trackerless

jah · Post by **jah** » Tue Mar 04, 2008 9:36 am

why do you need dht so badly? it isn't a silver bullet

diamondsw · Post by **diamondsw** » Tue Mar 04, 2008 4:25 pm

jah wrote:why do you need dht so badly? it isn't a silver bullet

No, but when you have an obscure torrent or a dead tracker, it's that or nothing. I have one that's running slower than eDonkey, but it is running in Azureus. With Transmission I won't get a single byte. Thus I'm running all of Azureus (with the Java bloat and such) for a single torrent, while everything else runs in Transmission.

Obviously things work better if you don't have to rely on DHT. But sometimes you have no alternative, and Transmission falls down on that.

Post by **John Clay** » Tue Mar 04, 2008 5:47 pm

diamondsw wrote:
John Clay wrote:There are no plans to implement DHT as this time. If you would like to submit patches for it, by all means, go right ahead.
None? So much for ever getting Azureus off my machine...

As I said before: there are no plans to implement DHT at this time. Feel free to submit your own patches.

macintoshhd · Post by **macintoshhd** » Tue Mar 04, 2008 10:48 pm

John Clay wrote:
diamondsw wrote:
John Clay wrote:There are no plans to implement DHT as this time. If you would like to submit patches for it, by all means, go right ahead.
None? So much for ever getting Azureus off my machine...
As I said before: there are no plans to implement DHT at this time. Feel free to submit your own patches.

DHT is the oldest yet open bug/feature request for T. Probably the most requested feature. I guess we will have to wait more.

Post by **livings124** » Wed Mar 05, 2008 12:37 am

macintoshhd wrote:DHT is the oldest yet open bug/feature request for T. Probably the most requested feature. I guess we will have to wait more.

Either contribute or quit your whining.

diamondsw · Post by **diamondsw** » Wed Mar 05, 2008 12:50 am

livings124 wrote:
macintoshhd wrote:DHT is the oldest yet open bug/feature request for T. Probably the most requested feature. I guess we will have to wait more.
Either contribute or quit your whining.

I'm absolutely shocked at such treatment of your users, who are simply making their needs known. How would you recommend non-coders (99% of the population) meaningfully contribute to such a goal?

Based solely on this, I'll use Azureus. The interface might not be as streamlined, but it works reliably. I can only imagine the developers are more pleasant and user-focused; they certainly can't be less.

Post by **livings124** » Wed Mar 05, 2008 12:55 am

diamondsw wrote:
livings124 wrote:
macintoshhd wrote:DHT is the oldest yet open bug/feature request for T. Probably the most requested feature. I guess we will have to wait more.
Either contribute or quit your whining.
I'm absolutely shocked at such treatment of your users, who are simply making their needs known. How would you recommend non-coders (99% of the population) meaningfully contribute to such a goal?

Based solely on this, I'll use Azureus. The interface might not be as streamlined, but it works reliably. I can only imagine the developers are more pleasant and user-focused; they certainly can't be less.

5 pages of the same users saying they want the same thing over and over. Saying "I guess we will have to wait more." is not the way to ask for us to implement something wanted, especially when we work for free on our own time.

You're not doing us favors by using our software, so repeating "Make this your priority!" "I'm using another app until you do what I want" won't encourage us. I'm sorry I'm not focusing all my effort towards making you happy.

Post by **Jordan** » Wed Mar 05, 2008 1:55 am

I guess I get to play "good cop" here.

It's very common for drive-by forum posters say "your program is worthless because it's missing feature X! drop everything and implement it now, or you've lost me as a customer, buddy!" -- only frequently much ruder. I've seen this literally hundreds of times over the years on the various projects I've volunteered on.

With respect to DHT, it is our most-requested remaining feature, so no doubt I'll implement it at some point. My personal opinion is that its "bang for the buck" score is rather low -- it's a fairly complicated feature, and most people only use it when their tracker's temporarily down -- so I haven't gotten around to it yet.

If you really, really have to have this feature show up sooner rather than later, drop a few hundred bucks in the tip jar with the comment "for DHT", or contribute a patch. I'd prefer the patch.

diamondsw · Post by **diamondsw** » Wed Mar 05, 2008 2:08 am

Jordan wrote:I guess I get to play "good cop" here.

It's very common for drive-by forum posters say "your program is worthless because it's missing feature X! drop everything and implement it now, or you've lost me as a customer, buddy!" -- only frequently much ruder. I've seen this literally hundreds of times over the years on the various projects I've volunteered on.

With respect to DHT, it is our most-requested remaining feature, so no doubt I'll implement it at some point. My personal opinion is that its "bang for the buck" score is rather low -- it's a fairly complicated feature, and most people only use it when their tracker's temporarily down -- so I haven't gotten around to it yet.

If you really, really have to have this feature show up sooner rather than later, drop a few hundred bucks in the tip jar with the comment "for DHT", or contribute a patch. I'd prefer the patch.

The response is greatly appreciated. While some users have "demanded" it, I don't think it's invalid for us to point out that it is heavily requested, has been heavily requested for some time, and (at least in my case) point out a use case.

Perhaps this is a difference in perception. You stated that "most people only use it when their tracker's temporarily down". Perhaps that is the case for most people, but I know that I use it frequently almost like eDonkey - when a torrent is completely and truly dead (tracker gone, or extremely rare seeding), this still allows me to get the file, with a bit of patience. Please, correct me if I'm misunderstanding the feature.

I'm certainly not saying drop everything and do this, but hearing that there are "no plans" comes across very differently than "we have a lot of more pressing priorities, not to mention it's very complex". I was worried that this had been decided "never to happen".

As for contributing patches, I wish I could, but my software engineering experience is getting rather dated, and I assume that Transmission is written in Objective-C/Cocoa. Sadly, I've never been able to force my brain around the sheer syntax of the language, as silly as that may sound.

As I said before, I'm going to have to use Azureus. I have torrents that I cannot download in any way other than with DHT, and as has been noted elsewhere there are kernel-level issues in OS X right now that affect many programs, causing kernel panics with P2P and other networking applications. I figure running one less torrent app may make my system that much more stable. I was hoping to ditch Azureus, but without DHT, I have to ditch Transmission.

I just found out my attic reinsulation may be a lot less than expected, so maybe I will be able to drop a chunk of change in the tip jar. What if all of us who are interested contributed $20, and see just how many of us there are?

Post by **Jordan** » Wed Mar 05, 2008 4:21 am

"we have a lot of more pressing priorities, not to mention it's very complex"

That's a pretty fair summary, IMO.

As for contributing patches, I wish I could, but my software engineering experience is getting rather dated, and I assume that Transmission is written in Objective-C/Cocoa.

The backend is written in straight C... that's where DHT will eventually be added.

cheers

diamondsw · Post by **diamondsw** » Wed Mar 05, 2008 4:55 am

Jordan wrote:
"we have a lot of more pressing priorities, not to mention it's very complex"
That's a pretty fair summary, IMO.

As for contributing patches, I wish I could, but my software engineering experience is getting rather dated, and I assume that Transmission is written in Objective-C/Cocoa.
The backend is written in straight C... that's where DHT will eventually be added.

Ah... well in that case, I'll definitely peer in there soon. I haven't had a crack at some good C in a long time now. I've been mired in *shiver* Visual Basic at work... It's been rotting my brain.

Jethryn Freyman · Post by **Jethryn Freyman** » Wed Mar 05, 2008 6:33 am

Jordan wrote:it's a fairly complicated feature, and most people only use it when their tracker's temporarily down -- so I haven't gotten around to it yet.

This is pretty much it, right now I have a couple of badly seeded torrents tracked by a single tacker I've never heard of before. No data downloaded after 3 days.

Not complaining though, I realise that a feature like DHT was be difficult to implement and get running smoothly, and it honestly doesn't seem to be that important.

I'll take a look around and see if anybody I know (or don't know) is interested in working on DHT for Transmission, should take a couple of days.

publicfacing · Post by **publicfacing** » Wed Mar 05, 2008 5:23 pm

Jethryn, have you thought about loading those torrents into Azureus?

Jethryn Freyman · Post by **Jethryn Freyman** » Wed Mar 05, 2008 9:14 pm

publicfacing wrote:Jethryn, have you thought about loading those torrents into Azureus?

I have a thing against Azureus

The weird thing is that each torrent has around 5 times more seeders than leechers (10-20 seeders each), but Transmission won't download (no pieces available, no peers connected), even though the tracker is online and is communicating fine to Transmission. The torrents are reported as public, not private. Is there any way that this is actually a private torrent, which was created with a public flag instead of a private one, and all the seeders are actually being tracked by a private tracker?

jah · Post by **jah** » Fri Mar 21, 2008 5:49 am

is this c library of any use for implementing the dht feature?

http://kadc.sourceforge.net/