PaulHowarth/Blog/2006-11-02

Thursday 2nd November 2006

Local Packages

bittorrent 5.0.0 is out at last. As is often the case, there's little evidence that anyone has done any testing on the command-line clients, since many of them produce tracebacks as soon as they're started, as in other recent versions:

The seed client, launchmany-ccnsole: 

Traceback (most recent call last): 
  File "/usr/bin/btseed", line 82, in ?
    config['torrent_dir'] = \
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'decode_from_filesystem'

The curses client, bittorrent-curses: 

>>> unable to setrlimit  not allowed to raise maximum limit 
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/bittorrent-curses", line 45, in ?
    from BitTorrent.RawServer_twisted import RawServer, task
ImportError: cannot import name task

Contrary to the install documentation, python 2.3 is no longer supported since the code uses collections.deque, which was introduced in python 2.4. There appears to be an effort to work around this problem in one of the places that it's used, but the same technique isn't universally used and hence it doesn't work.

Normally I'd just declare this all as a bad job and forget about it but today I had a bit of a look into it in more detail and managed to fix the tracebacks despite knowing hardly any python at all. I've stripped out all support for distributions with python older than 2.4 in my bittorrent-5.0.0 package though.

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