removal of proxy support

[beanfootage]

I've seen the threads on the GTK+ and Mac support sections regarding proxy support removal, but this change affects all Transmission variants so I'm posting here. I do understand the point that the proxy support only impacts communication with the tracker, but I think the issue is less about "what traffic goes through the proxy" than "is it a good idea to remove features with a point (or any) release". I'd like to see the proxy feature come back and just continue to be optional. I can't see removing a working feature outright unless supporting it was just more trouble than it's worth. Was that the case?

Aside from the issues about principle, what about users who require proxies to access the web at all? Maybe this is a bad example, but there are surely use cases out there that the proxy _was_ useful for, even if what it was really doing was commonly misunderstood.

I'm not sure who can provide answers here (hopefully the developers read these boards) but I'd be interested to hear back. One other possibility would be to just provide patches to re-enable proxy support in future versions, but I suspect that that _would_ become too much trouble to be worthwhile, and quickly.

Thanks for whatever info anybody can give!

[Rolcol]

Like you said, proxy support was incomplete. It was removed to get a better idea about how users of Transmission used it in the first place.

https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/3688

[beanfootage]

Like you said, proxy support was incomplete. It was removed to get a better idea about how users of Transmission used it in the first place.

Sure, I understand that, and I read that ticket before posting. If the idea is to remove the feature in order to understand how the now-missing feature had been used, that is, make a perturbation and observe the response, then I think the response in these forums has indicated that people had been using it, and noticed its absence. There are a few things I interpret slightly differently, though:

From that ticket,

Our proxy support is not very good -- we only support tracker proxies, not peer ones -- and few people have seemed to mind or even notice.

I think it could be the case that supporting tracker proxies is completely fine. It didn't pretend to do something other than this. In this sense, the proxy support was not incomplete, it was just targeted to specific types of connections. It's unclear if few people noticed or minded -- I knew about the limitations and used it anyway. I didn't proactively announce that I knew it, but I did know it, and I'm sure there are plenty of other users out there in this boat.

Additionally,

If the lesson here is that few people use proxies, we should remove the feature as bloat.

By this logic, any feature that's used by only a portion of users should be removed. I think it's kind of silly to look at it this way. Why not just let the few people who would like to use a feature go ahead and use it while the rest of the users don't?

Anyway, just my two cents. I'd like if the old feature remained there as an option, as opposed to going away entirely. Alternatively, that ticket also notes:

If the lesson here is that our proxy support isn't good enough, then we should still remove the feature and replace it with something better.

So an option would be to keep it until the "something better" was rolled out to replace it, instead of having a series of releases that contained neither.

Again, thanks for your input!

[tkoun]

though it is easy to find a lot of stupid decisions with regards to software development, it is very hard to find THE stupidest decision... this is one and I'm glad to find it! it does not take to be a genius to see how erroneous it is and what kind of crappy arguments the developer needs to invent to back it up.

one thing about free software is that it is destined to the community so when feedback comes back from the community it is not only stupid to ignore it but it is against first principles as well.

from my side I switched to deluge but I kept my transmission 2.05 so that I can check from time to time how far stupidity can go...