Especially since the bittorent gtk client does work with
MozillaFirebird but it doesn't seem to do that with Epiphany

If it works in firebird should not be hard to make it work in
epiphany. I guess someone should just install bittorrent and see
what's going wrong ...

While supporting the bittorrent client would be a good thing, it'd be
even better (but harder and maybe not worth doing now) to have
bittorrent support built-in to the downloader so you use the same
familiar Epiphany download interface with bittorrent rather than
having a separate application.

-> Downloads

Integrating bt in ephy's downloader does not make sense, plain old http
downloads and bt are based on different models (leech vs. swarm? :)). We'll make
sure whatever bt app the user has works properly with ephy.

I admit I didnt use bittorrent much but where exactly the models are different
from user point of view ?
I imagine you click on a bittorrent link and a download is started. You have a
filename, a destination and a progress...

Reopening so we dont forget to discuss this.

See also http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=236755 .

Perhaps (integration with) http://gnome-bt.sourceforge.net/ is what we want?
Especially since we can now have python extensions! :-)

Mass reassigning of Epiphany bugs to epiphany-maint@b.g.o

This was discussed on irc, one important objection was that bt downloaders are
supposed to report on uploads too and to stay open after the download has
completed. Any ideas on this?

Since the Gnome is increasingly being distributed using bittorrent (the Gnome LiveCD as a specific example) I meant to bring up the idea of having some kind of basic torrent support in Gnome itself.  
Ubuntu uses Gnome BT which is fairly basic.  I suppose ideally Gnome would have some kind of library for bittorrent with Epiphany using just a small part of it and bigger apps using more if it if needed.  

I haven't seen how Opera provides torrent support but it does show the idea is sound.  

> downloaders are supposed to report on uploads too and to stay open after 
> the download has completed. Any ideas on this?

"supposed to"  ... (swearing under breath)

I remember similar comments in the early mozilla days when netscape were being pushed to allow "Save as Web Page complete" and they didn't want to leech from and put undue pressure on the Netscape Webserver (now AOL sever) instead of making users their priority.  

If the torrent protocol cannot tolerate leeching it is broken by design, but as far as I know the design will choke leechers to slower speeds but not prevent them from getting the file eventually.  (It has to be done this way, otherwise someone could just write a really bad client and cheat the system.)  

Realistically torrents share quite a lot while you are downloading in many cases (and I seem to average about 20% often more than that especially with larger longer lived files, even though my upload is severely choked).  

Apparently there is a newer feature which allows torrent files to be hosted on a web server where they clearly expect the worst case to be the user downloads the entire file from the website and any shared bandwidth is a bonus.  In a case like that any upload support from epiphany would be a bonus.  

Obviously Epiphany wants to be a good citizen and users want to get good download speeds so a certain amount of sharing will be necessary but it should be possible to do that within the lifetime of a download or at worst within the browsing session.  

Of course if the task was passed out cleanly to an external app several of these points would be moot.  

Alan, I would think bittorrent support would be a good candidate to be implemented as an extension first. 

I agree that it's way past due to have some kind of "native" bittorrent support in GNOME, but for reference, see also this thread: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/marketing-list/2005-December/msg00295.html

Transmission: http://transmission.m0k.org/ contains a C library (as well as a front-end) for doing Bitorrent, which might be helpful here.

I'm inclined to WONTFIX this bug.

The only argument that remotely supported a bt downloader in epiphany was comment 3 "so you use the same familiar Epiphany download interface with bittorrent rather than having a separate application" and this argument will go away when we kill the downloader view in favour of nud's task manager.

And re: comment 19, I don't think we should encourage anti-social behaviour.

BT downloading really belong into a dedicated application, which epiphany will launch when you click on the link.

You won't see me complaining.

WONTFIX then. Torrents should be handed over to external apps.