Shareaza

Hello,

What is the general word on adding more BT features to Shareaza? Is there work being done? Are there plans to?
There are some important ones, which are supported by other clients, such as:
- encryption (particularly important since deep packet inspection is becoming ubiquitous)
- DHT (until Shareaza becomes the dominant BT client, workarounds that only work with other Shareaza clients cannot be considered as solutions)
- etc.


Thank you.

AFAIK, the current main developer raspopov has done preliminary work on adding DHT support to Shareaza. No idea of any kind of schedule of adding working support. I randomly guess the main delay is that the overheads of running DHT add up when you need to support three of them and would all be away from G2 performance. So as long as not having them works, they are not a big priority. To repeat: I am just guessing, if somebody knows, I'd love being told how I am wrong.

I do hope that raspopov (or others) manage to find the time to implement these features.

Also see "BitTorrent’s Future".

I think Shareaza already has peer exchange and btih magnets seem on track to be fully supported in the next release. Both were IIRC borrowed to BT from the other networks Shareaza supports, so they are not a problem.

I am not a BT expert by any stretch of imagination, but you are probably thinking about the Shareaza implementation of trackerless torrents, which only works with clients that support both BT and G2. (You can search sources for the btih in the G2 network.)

But obviously I could be wrong about it. Although I don't really see why Shareaza would not support a feature it has for every other network. And I have never heard of Shareaza using any kind of proprietary extensions when communicating with peers.

Again, if somebody knows, feel free to speak up.

Did a quick look at the source, still no idea if Shareaza supports the Azureus style peer exchange, but you were probably right about there being a separate peer exchange extension for G2 clients. I just have never seen anything special about clients supporting it, whether that is because they are that rare or because Shareaza supports peer exchange for other clients as well, who knows.

Really, and I thought SmokeX was literally chased out? There is still a libtorrent branch which contains primary work of SmokeX ... it is by far unusable but it's a symbol that this wasn't a new idea. Personally I'm in favor of it and would encourage the adoption of a tertiary set of code which takes the burden of finding bug fixes later on, and comes with a complete feature set of BT then what Shareaza has right now.

Ryo can explain for himself on this matter I never heard his side of the argument.

The current Shareaza BT system is not defunct by any stretch ... but it is quite lacking and sorely needs a touch-up. I think what it is now is 10x better than it was a year ago ... but it could use another 10-50x more of refinement. As far as I know Shareaza doesn't support PEX, it gets most of it's peers from the tracker not from other Peers. PEX along could render the need for DHT a moot point because we have nearly all BT clients having DHT doing most of the leg work for us ... I think implementing this is a top priority.

The implementation was up before, now it's somewhat elusive ...

Below is some details I've obtained:

http://www.rasterbar.com/products/libto ... tocol.html