The ELinks BitTorrent Client ============================ The BitTorrent client is fully usable and has been tested on multiple sites, it does however still lack certain core functionally and is therefore marked experimental. Below, various known problems and limitations are listed: - Peer IDs should be restorable from ~/.config/elinks/downloadhist. - It needs to give up on unreachable peers. - It should be possible to specify the download location. - When the file is removed from under it (in the shell), either give a warning and stop downloading, or start over. - Addition of a blacklist, either temporary (session) or persistant. - Unsupported Tracker Protocol Error: When connecting to some trackers we get a returned failure reason reading: unsupported tracker protocol, please upgrade your client often this is due to the compact peer format is not enabled. We should maybe try to reconnect when this occurs. - Multiple Trackers: The metainfo file can contain a list of tracker URIs so that the client can handle tracker request errors more gracefully by attempting to connect to a new tracker. Although this functionality should be simple to add to the client we have chosen not to implement this. - Access to Disk: Currently, the are a couple of assertions in respect to disk access. Once pieces are completed they can never become incomplete again if something was to remove them from under the client. This is a valid assertion for most systems and usage. Furthermore, when writing and reading pieces, it is asserted that pieces are transferred correctly so that a read following a write will return the valid piece. - All access to disk uses blocking I/O. With the many consecutive reads and write the client uses, this can potential become a problem that can end up stalling all execution if the piece length is very big. For this reason, the ideas outlined in regard to a more fine grained solution using block-oriented disk access is even more relevant. - No download or upload rate limiting: All transferring happens unconditionally; in other words there are no means to limit the rate data is transferred. This can potential deny other services from running. - Badly configured web servers: We have experienced that many web servers providing metainfo files are badly configured in that they do not correctly set the content type. We have therefore found it necessary to also allow application/x-torrent in addition to application/x-bittorrent. However, some servers set the content type to text/plain which, due to the way ELinks prioritises content types provided in the protocol header sent by the server, means that loading many metainfo files will not cause the BitTorrent download to be queried. As a workaround, the internal BitTorrent URI scheme can be used. This, however, will not open the download dialog, but keep the download progress entirely in the status bar of the browser. - IPv6: Although certain informal extensions to the BitTorrent protocol, such as the compact peer information format returned by the tracker, are optimised for IPv4, the protocol works for IPv6. We have only tested the client under IPv4. - Multiple Resumes: By default ELinks does three connection attempts. This can cause the resuming to happen multiple times if the initial tracker connection causes the main BitTorrent connection to timeout.