> It doesn't seem to work in OS X 10.8, it starts then closes immediately.
I'm opening a bug report for this. I didn't check 10.8 yet.
> Also the choice of wxWIdgets for a new app is quite unfortunate, I think Qt is generally easier to develop with and to make it work on different platforms.
wxWidgets is the only toolkit I know of that uses native widgets on all platforms. Other toolkits draw things manually, although some (such as Qt) are getting better at integrating with the graphics and metrics of individual platforms.
Using wxWidgets was a deliberate decision that I made early in the process.
At least it's native instead of GTK. I'm not a osx user, although I understand the desire to have pretty and consistent user interfaces. My problem is that I'm limited by what wxWidgets makes available on its cocoa port, and not all widgets are available. This is why the toolbar looks out of place.
As soon as wxWidgets gets more widgets, I'll make it look better.
> private trackers may not allow them
Yep, but that's a policy of private trackers, and not something I can easily overcome. I'm not sure whining in the public forums would give me anything except rants. The only way this can be fixed is by people using baretorrent and asking their favorite private tracker to support it.
baretorrent is not "small", it's simple. Most of its size comes from wxWidgets and python, which are there for the extensions. Linking statically to all the libraries and ditching python could probably reduce the size by an order of magnitude.
> but also entirely without tests? Or did I miss something?
You did not, but I'm up to a point where this is becoming very difficult to manage without unit testing, and it slows down and reduces the quality of my releases. I'm actively using baretorrent on debian and developing it on windows, but my tests on osx are limited. It also became a complex system much quicker than I anticipated (like most systems do).
> This is an interesting space to watch. Over the years, we've seen the cycle happen half a dozen times
This is not specific to torrent clients. Feature-creep is common. Since this was posted to HN, there's been a couple of posts of the baretorrent forums (and I've received a few emails) about feature requests. Software does not necessarily get bloated because developers keep coming up with new ideas, it's mostly because every user wants something more.
Saying no pisses people off, but I'm hoping I can move most of the requests over to extensions.
> Then somebody starts offering enough ad money that maybe the idea of a tiny little banner ad isn't such a bad idea after all.
Don't worry, I'll tag the source just before that happens so someone sane can fork it.
[edit: also, I'm really sad that I didn't think of "scrunchyTorrent" before]