Currently, gTorrent, a bittorrent client designed for the Gnome desktop environment, is hovering in the 0.0.x release range. According to my rough project roadmap, this means that it is in an internal development stage. However, the longer we go without a release, the more people begin to ask for it. The feature set for our first public release (which will be v0.1.0) is complete, the only thing left is debugging. Even this early on, gTorrent has it’s share of show-stopping issues, and those issues are what I want to resolve before unleashing gTorrent to the public.

Right now, the features of gTorrent remain fairly simple. It does have the ability to handle multiple torrents at one time, and it is able to resume torrents and hide the window in the system tray. These basic features are what you can expect in our initial v0.1.0 release. Features still to come include an in-depth feature pane, local caching of .torrent files, and bandwidth capping. These releases will make their way into the next few releases, and once they are looked into, be assigned as milestones for upcoming versions of gTorrent (v0.2.0, v0.3.0, etc).

The client does not at this time support encryption, and when or if we are going to include it in the first development branch leading to a v1.0 release is not for certain yet. This is due, not to anything particular on our end, but to the lack of encryption support in the libtorrent libraries we are using to build the application. However, v1.0.0 is still a long way off, so there will be plenty of time to assess the need for encryption and make a more informed decision.

Just off the top of my head, here is a preliminary outline of a few of the features I’d like to incorporate in the near future, and when I expect to have them in:

• gTorrent v0.2.0
• Implement a peerid system
• Create a ~/.gtorrent directory and allow reading and writing to a config file
• gTorrent v0.3.0
• Allow capping bandwidth speed
• Cache .torrent files on opening into ~/.gtorrent/torrents