BitTorrent

BitTorrent is one of those applications that most people love. I love it when it works but I find it unnecessarily cumbersome to deal with.

One example of what I dislike in the software - you can't tell when a torrent has finished. Start a download:

btdownload{curses headless} foo.torrent

Once the download has finished it doesn't stop, it just continues to share the files and allow others to download faster. Great 99% of the time. But utterly sucky when you want to download XX files.

The natural temptation is to run:

for i in *.torrent; do \
  btdownloadheadless $i
done

That doesn't work. The first one never finishes. There isn't even the option of exiting once the download has completed - or running another command, say.

(OK my copy has "-at_finish=/bin/foo" - but only because I patched it. This just seems like a basic requirement, right?)

Despite that it works well so I can live with it.

My other irritation is that there is no functioning Apache mod_bittorrent where files into a directory have their .torrent files created and handled magically.

There was a project to do this, but it appears dead now.

Shame. Every now and again I get tempted to work on it, then I remember that I have big limits.

ION

Lots of Perl coding today.

Simple plugin interfaces, and cleanups of old code. Almost enough to keep me awake.

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