qBittorrent project needs help on Windows front

[christophe.dumez]

Hi,

qBittorrent was downloaded 145 000 times last month on Sourceforge and almost 80 percent of those downloads are for Windows. I keep gettings emails from users moving away from uTorrent and looking towards qBittorrent as an alternative. This is really encouraging!

There is however a serious lack of Windows developers in the project. SledgeHammer who is our only Windows developer has been idle for quite some time due to personal reasons. Mkdib is nice enough to package new builds of qBittorrent for Windows but he does not have time to do more (testing, fixing bugs or adding features). I personally don't even have a machine running Windows and I'm already taking care of Linux and Mac OS X platforms.

qBittorrent is a truly Open Source project, and as such, anyone can and should contribute to it. I'm therefore reaching out to the community asking for more people to contribute, especially on Windows platform. ANY help would be welcome and I will do my best to bring the newcomers up to speed so that they can become productive in a timely fashion. If WE don't do anything about the situation, qBittorrent will become less stable on Windows or worse, it will no longer be compatible.

Here is all you need to know to contribute code:

• The GIT repository is located at http://git.qbittorrent.org, it is hosted on github which has a nice way for making pull requests and review patches.
• The documentation to help people build qBittorrent on Windows is there.
• The bug tracker has a lot of open tickets, a lot of those for Windows and is located at http://bugs.qbittorrent.org.
• I'm easily reachable by email if anyone needs help getting started and I promise to review patches promptly.

If you cannot contribute code, any help to make qBittorrent more stable on Windows is welcome. Finding bugs on Windows is of course useful. Providing me with debug backtraces in case of crashes or pointing me in the right direction in the code would be even better. Being able to test bug fixes would also be appreciated.

I am aware of the following issues on Windows that need addressing:

• There is no way to provide a useful bug report on Windows in case of a crash. A lot of programs on Windows show a dialog asking the user if they want to report the crash and the tool will file a bug report by itself and attach the code dumps / backtrace to it. Without a way of getting at least the backache, it is extremely difficult to debug crashers.
• The search angine gets easily broken on Windows, probably due to issues with installs of Python and problems detecting python executable and its location.
• There are still encoding issues when using international languages such as Chinese and Arabic.
• It is likely that paths are sometimes displayed using slashes as separators instead of backslashes.
• The installer should open the ports on the firewall (I don't think it does currently).
• We do not have 64bit builds.

There are probably many other things you can find or think of. I really hope you guys can help make a better experience for qBittorrent users on Windows.

[newborn]

111 reads and no response ! unfortunately i am no developer and dunno a thing about "coding". I will pass the word on other forums however and hope that some help will come your way....i can't IMAGINE qbt dying for windows !!!! that is just INSANE !

[ironcross]

Yesterday i posted this in 2 forums, but no actual response until now, that's why i keep silence in this topic. That's very bad news for the Windows part of the project, indeed.

[shiki]

For people who are interested: GitHub just released their "for Windows" client. It's a 100% native Windows application, that runs fast, and it's easy to use.
Get it here: http://windows.github.com/

Just simply install it, and there will be a new button at the project's GitHub page (that Chris linked in his post).

As for the development, I'll try to fetch Qt and get this thing working on Windows.

The problems:
- [INSTALLER] - I don't think we should open a port. Maybe add an option like uTorrent, but definitely no default add. But again: It will ask whether you want to add it as an exception, or block it. If you run it first time and there is no rules set to the app, Windows will ask.

- [CORE]         - 64 bit builds are not needed. That is still somewhat "futuristic" on Windows. We only have some 64-bit browsers, but none of them are officially supported or have a major market share. As qBittorent won't do extensive CPU work, we don't need them. Of course, people got slower machines too, but there you use XP, or a 32-bit Windows. Not 64-bit, since it requires more space, more memory. While the userland will be still mostly 32-bit geared. Doesn't worth it.

- [CORE/WIN]  - Encode: Even uTorrent fails to name the folders correctly. I don't know what could we do with that. But it's pretty sure Windows supports those languages.
- [CORE/WIN]  - Slashes: It may be a naming thing in Qt, I'll look into that.

- [CORE/WIN]  - Python: I think we should use ONE python on Windows, like ActiveState. Then promote that, detect it. Maybe an optional installer option: "Download and install ActiveState Python".

[shiki]

Anyone up to package the latest release?

[christophe.dumez]

- [INSTALLER] - I don't think we should open a port. Maybe add an option like uTorrent, but definitely no default add. But again: It will ask whether you want to add it as an exception, or block it. If you run it first time and there is no rules set to the app, Windows will ask.

Of course, it should ask. The installer should do nothing without asking the user first.

- [CORE]         - 64 bit builds are not needed. That is still somewhat "futuristic" on Windows. We only have some 64-bit browsers, but none of them are officially supported or have a major market share. As qBittorent won't do extensive CPU work, we don't need them. Of course, people got slower machines too, but there you use XP, or a 32-bit Windows. Not 64-bit, since it requires more space, more memory. While the userland will be still mostly 32-bit geared. Doesn't worth it.

Is it really futuristic on Windows? All CPUs are 64bits nowadays and running a 32bit OS on top of them is just a waste. For people actually living in our century, running a 64bit qBittorrent on a 64bit Windows actually makes a lot of sense for performance and functionality. Forcing people that have a 64bit OS to run a 32bit qBittorrent does not make any sense.

- [CORE/WIN]  - Encode: Even uTorrent fails to name the folders correctly. I don't know what could we do with that. But it's pretty sure Windows supports those languages.

qBittorrent usually handles that pretty well nowadays but there are still bugs here and there, either in qBittorrent or libtorrent. I know for example that you cannot create a torrent that contains a file with arabic in its name. This issue only impacts Windows.

- [CORE/WIN]  - Slashes: It may be a naming thing in Qt, I'll look into that.

Yes, Qt uses slashes for separators internally I believe. In most places, I convert the slashes to backslashes before displaying the paths but it is likely I forgot it in several places.

- [CORE/WIN]  - Python: I think we should use ONE python on Windows, like ActiveState. Then promote that, detect it. Maybe an optional installer option: "Download and install ActiveState Python".

I'm not sure there is any benefit for us to use ActiveState Python compared to the regular Windows installer from python.org.

If someone as any trouble compiling qBittorrent on Windows, please notify me. As I said, I have no idea if the GIT master branch is compiling on Windows or not. The code has changed a lot and I have no easy way to test.

[shiki]

Is it really futuristic on Windows? All CPUs are 64bits nowadays and running a 32bit OS on top of them is just a waste. For people actually living in our century, running a 64bit qBittorrent on a 64bit Windows actually makes a lot of sense for performance and functionality. Forcing people that have a 64bit OS to run a 32bit qBittorrent does not make any sense.

Belive it or not, the short answer is: yes.
If there would be an app that could measure the installed 64-bit and 32-bit applications, you would be surprised. I'm using this install for a year or so, and I've installed a lot of applications during this time. The only 64-bit native applications on my system are: Oracle Java JDK, Adobe Flash (it's a mess on 64-bit), and Adobe Photoshop.

That's it. To be honest, I don't mind. Windows handles 32-bit different. While on Linux, you need a whole bunch of i686/i386 packages just to have the sub-system (and it will or won't work), and it loads for seconds sometimes (loading all the libs), it works perfectly on Windows. Also, 32-bit applications come with a smaller memory footprint, which is a nice feature to have. Speed? 64-bit only means faster execution if the task is REALLY, REALLY CPU-intensive. For example: Rendering, calculating. But for userland apps like qBittorrent? No benefits, just the extra work of testing. You only install a 64-bit Windows if you have 4gb+ RAM. Unlike Linux, where you install 64-bit if your CPU supports it.

Even uTorrent ships 32-bit binaries. They plan on releasing a 64-bit build, but I guess it'll take years. (Just like the whole transition to 64-bit thing.)

If you want to ship it, and someone will take the maintainer role, it would worth checking the XChat-WDK project. A free XChat for Windows. It may provide some useful information about how to do it nice and clean. (That project 32-bit and 64-bit Windows builds from every release, so I guess it's possible.)

I'm not sure there is any benefit for us to use ActiveState Python compared to the regular Windows installer from python.org.

Sorry I didn't notice the official package. Hmm... we should go with the portable one then. Just grab it (like Pidgin does with GTK), and unpack it inside qBittorent's folder.

[Nemo]

If I could package and keep up the windows builds I would like to do it or atleast try it but the thing is that I never compiled or worked with anything around it. I could try to experiment with it if there is a ''How to'' available which explains everything detailed step by step, but still im not sure how it will work out. fszymanski (inactive?), sledge, mkdib.. much respect for helping us with the windows versions but still the windows part lacks as you mentioned Chris for example compared with other os'es now 2.9.9 is released but we are still at 2.9.7 current stable version as windows users cause 2.9.8 has problems with many. I did not test 2.9.8 myself but people who tested it reported their problems so I decided to not to install it cause alot of torrents are running now with 2.9.7 (few important ones) and don't want to risk it for the moment.

qBittorrent v2.9.8 only brings compilation fixes and some minimal UI fixes so the new problems are unrelated to it. If something is wrong with this build (and many users seem to agree on this), then it is likely to be either a packaging/building issue or a buggy snapshot of libtorrent v0.16. I hope mkdib can figure this out. Also it would be nice to update Qt and boost since the versions used start to be really outdated.

Chris states here the important points where the problems might come from and as you can see this can be caused by number of things. These points should be explored and perhaps fixed, but it can be confusing really. The final question remains that we need someone here to go that deep and provide a stable build for windows users, atleast to keep up with the changes and versions that would be enough already in my opinion.

[shiki]

Once you have a working setup, it's just re-compiling the same way.
You can start by searching for a good installer (there are so many around...). Once you have that, there are documentations for every installer.
Compiling? Uhm, I have yet to set up an environment, but I would have no time to compile every release and relase them in time. Maybe I could compile them for you and you could package them? I don't know. :-/

About the stability: I'm running qBittorrent now 0/24 on a very fast speed, so if any bug is lurking in the Win build, I'll find them.

[loki]

I did the whole install of MSVC, but I got lost on how to setup a build environment... and have never really built anything from source ever. (on windows especially)
Would it be easier to cross-compile, if that's the proper term, build windows binaries on linux? Wouldn't have to worry about setting an environment, or easier to set up an environment? Maybe I'm over complicating things...

[christophe.dumez]

And Microsoft is not helping Open Source developers on their platform: http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/374854/no-free-visual-studio-for-windows-8-desktop-developers

[Chem456]

Unfortunately with all those dependencies and static vs dynamic linking creates the usual mess. I could give it a go, but last time I built qBittorrent I had trouble statically linking everything. Unfortunately I'm not very familiar with Qt. If I succeed the first thing I'll do is provide clear up to date instructions. Then provide an Inno Setup script. But don't get your hopes up since I'm very busy this period. I would really like to have an open source quality replacement for utorrent but I already miss a few things utorrent has and qBittorrent does not like the upload speed change when not downloading.

Anyway enough with that, I'll try to set up a VM tomorrow or so.

PS. Personally I don't really like bjam or Qt...

A couple of other things I'd like to see:
1) The ability to run qBittorrent in portable mode by keeping all the settings and stuff to the same directory the executable is in. Of course there should always be a check if the directory is writable or not (UAC etc).
2) The memory usage needs a lot of work. qBittorrent does not seem to decrease its memory usage when download speed is not high.
3) I'm very interested in a native 64bit build regardless of what skiki says. We live in 2012 and there is absolutely no reason to keep using 32bit builds of programs. Good programmed software should run fine on 64bit Windows. The uTorrent developers messed up everything. Mozilla has other reasons but they are moving to this direction finally.
4) A first quick and dirty patch to add the VersionInfo  http://pastebin.com/7PbEaaUW. This should be automated but since I don't have checked out the source yet I cannot provide a better patch.

[alain93]

Hello,
Je suis la doc et j'essaye d'importer qbittorrent.pro dans Qt creator, mais il me dit qu'il ne trouve pas de valide version de Qt.
Suivant les liens j'ai telecharge Qt 4.8.2 and creator 2.5.0. Est-ce que cela devrait marche avec ca?
Plus, dans les Options, j'ai une erreur. (voir attachments)

[fszymanski]

Hi,
yesterday I received an email from @NeMo_0 in which he asks me about a new Windows build.
I'm sorry but I switch completely from Windows to Linux (for now, do not even have Windows running in VirtualBox).
I also started using a new BitTorrent client - "Tix..." (once again I am sorry).

[Nemo]

Oh well, still searching then. Hope we can found someone.