Plans for net-p2p/rblibtorrent*, and future of net-p2p/sharktorrent

[Doug Barton]

Howdy!

First a little background. There are two rblibtorrent ports now, the 
main port which is currently at version 0.13 which is quite old, and the 
-devel port which is at version 0.14.8 which is actually what is now 
considered the "current" version. There is also a newer 0.15 version 
available which is considered the "development" version.

With the recent update of springlobby (thanks amdmi3!) the last 
remaining consumer of rblibtorrent 0.13 is net-p2p/sharktorrent which is 
maintained by alepulver. The version currently in this port is 0.1.1, 
which was released on 2006/12/17. The most recent version of the 
software is 0.1.8.4-beta which was released on 2009/7/5. The web site 
listed in the pkg-descr, http://sharktorrent.com/ is currently parked, 
and has no relevant content.

My first choice to move forward is to repocopy rblibtorrent-devel to 
rblibtorrent14 AND rblibtorrent15. To the rblibtorrent15 port I will add 
the -devel PKGNAMESUFFIX until it's finalized. I'd also like to twiddle 
the LATEST_LINK stuff so that rblibtorrent sets NO_LATEST_LINK, and 
rblibtorrent14 sets LATEST_LINK=rblibtorrent.

As for sharktorrent and rblibtorrent it seems to me that they could both 
go away. The sharktorrent port uses WX so I haven't tried building it 
with 0.14.8 of rblibtorrent to see if it could easily be updated. Given 
that the version we have is so out of date I also don't see much point 
in even trying to fix it. There are also no PRs for it from interested 
users, so it would seem that it does not have a user base in any case.

On the other hand, if someone would like to step up and attempt to 
modernize the sharktorrent port I would have no objection provided that 
it did not continue to rely on rblibtorrent-0.13. Mail to alepulver on 
2010/1/2 has so far gone unanswered, so it's not clear to me that he's 
interested in continuing to maintain the port.

To round out the equation, the reason I'd like to move forward with 
rblibtorrent 0.15 is that qbittorrent (which I also began maintaining 
recently, and what started this whole affair) can use 0.14.8 quite well 
which is what it's doing now. However, it can have an alternate 
dependency on 0.15 which will allow it to have some additional features. 
Also, since the author of rblibtorrent seems to be moving forward with 
new versions on a somewhat regular basis I'd like to set up the 
rblibtorrent* ports in a manner that will allow them to be easily 
maintained going forward (whether it's me that continues to maintain 
them or not).

If there is a strong consensus that the "current" version of the port 
_must_ be called rblibtorrent I won't fight against that, I just don't 
want to wait forever to move the 0.14.x version in there because there 
is one stale port that still depends on the 0.13 version.

So, opinions? Any rabid sharktorrent fans out there who would be 
terribly sad if it went away, or better yet would like to update it? Has 
anyone heard from alepulver? I doubt I'll get it all done before the 
7.3-RELEASE but I'd like to request the repocopies soon'ish so that I 
can at least get rblibtorrent15 into the tree and make it an alternate 
dependency for qbittorrent. So if you have something to say on this 
topic, speak up. :)


Doug

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