I’m suprised I completely forgot to post anything about RC 1 here a few days ago, so I’d like to go ahead and introduce the second RC release of Deluge 1.0.  Previously known as Deluge 0.6, Deluge 1.0 is a complete rewrite from the 0.5.x branch (which was in turn a complete rewrite of 0.4, which was a nearly complete rewrite of 0.3 ).

The big feature in 1.0 is the ability to separate the frontend and backend, so you can run the GTK UI on one computer and have the actual downloading happening on a completely separate computer on the network. This is a handy feature for people like myself who like to run most applications on their laptop, but would rather have the downloading (and storage of downloads) taken care of by a headless server or desktop.

Deluge 1.0 is the first release of Deluge to use libtorrent‘s official Python bindings instead of our older custom bindings.  By using the official bindings, the client now has access to the entire functionality of the libtorrent library, rather than just the subset of functions we had wrapped, which allows for easier integration of newer feature.

Deluge 1.0 is also the first release to not include any of my or Kripken’s original code.  The last release that I played a major role in was 0.5.1.  I stayed on doing some development and managerial work up through 0.5.3, but from 0.5.4 up through the latest stable release 0.5.9.3, the project was run by Markybob and Andar, with Andar doing most of the work on 0.6/1.0.

At the moment, Deluge 1.0 doesn’t include any of the plugins that Deluge 0.5 ships with, as they have yet to be ported over to the new format.

In the future, I’ll be working on a VMware Virtual Appliance to run Deluge’s backend.  This is part of a larger plan I’m brewing which is to essentially “Virtualize Everything,” but I’ll talk about that later.

For now, here’s a pretty extensive screenshot tour of Deluge 1.0: