About

Transmission OG (Old Generation) is a fork of Transmission 3.00 (fast, easy and free BitTorrent client). It comes in several flavours:

• GTK+ and Qt GUI applications for Linux, BSD, macOS, Windows, etc.
• a daemon for servers and routers
• a native macOS GUI application (a bit lagging in features, help welcome)
• a web UI for remote controlling any of the above

This fork is focused on stability, by rewinding the project's history back before the big C++ rewrite. It's meant to coexist with a Transmission installation, while being a drop-in replacement, so it changes binary names and it keeps the same configuration directories.

The only problem with this scheme is on Windows, where the Transmission installer configures transmission-daemon to start automatically as a service. This can be solved by stopping it from the "Services" app and changing its startup type from "Automatic" to "Manual".

Command line interface notes

Transmission OG is fully supported by transmission-og-remote, the preferred CLI client.

Three standalone tools to examine, create, and edit .torrent files exist: transmission-og-show, transmission-og-create, and transmission-og-edit, respectively.

Prior to development of transmission-og-remote, the standalone client transmission-og-cli was created. Limited to a single torrent at a time, transmission-og-cli is deprecated and exists primarily to support older hardware dependent upon it. In almost all instances, transmission-og-remote should be used instead.

Different distributions may choose to package any or all of these tools in one or more separate packages.

Packaging

A 64-bit Windows installer is provided for each release. It has no external dependencies. All installed binaries are statically linked and reproducible. The GTK+ client was chosen over the Qt one, because it has more features.

Gentoo Linux users need to use an overlay:

eselect repository enable stefantalpalaru
emaint sync --repo stefantalpalaru
emerge transmission-og

Building from source

Dependencies

Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends -yq \
         build-essential \
         gettext \
         intltool \
         libayatana-appindicator3-dev \
         libcurl4-openssl-dev \
         libglib2.0-dev \
         libgtk-3-dev \
         libnotify-dev \
         libssl-dev \
         libsystemd-dev \
         qttools5-dev \
         zlib1g-dev

macOS with Homebrew:

export CPPFLAGS="${CPPFLAGS} -I/usr/local/opt/gettext/include"
export LDFLAGS="${LDFLAGS} -L/usr/local/opt/gettext/lib"
export PATH="${PATH}:/usr/local/opt/qt@5/bin:/usr/local/opt/gettext/bin"
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/opt/qt@5/lib/pkgconfig:/usr/local/opt/openssl@1.1/lib/pkgconfig
export MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=12.0

brew install \
         autoconf \
         automake \
         cmake \
         gettext \
         gtk+3 \
         intltool \
         openssl@1.1 \
         pkg-config \
         qt@5

Windows with MSYS2's Mingw-w64 distribution:

pacman -Syu \
           base-devel \
           intltool \
           mingw-w64-x86_64-autotools \
           mingw-w64-x86_64-cmake \
           mingw-w64-x86_64-curl \
           mingw-w64-x86_64-gtk3 \
           mingw-w64-x86_64-libnotify \
           mingw-w64-x86_64-openssl \
           mingw-w64-x86_64-qt5-base \
           mingw-w64-x86_64-qt5-tools \
           mingw-w64-x86_64-qt5-winextras \
           mingw-w64-x86_64-toolchain \
           mingw-w64-x86_64-zlib

Building

Clone the Git repo:

git clone https://github.com/stefantalpalaru/transmission-og.git
cd transmission-og
# Not needed the first time, only after building, pulling and getting errors
# from the submodule update.
git submodule foreach --quiet --recursive "git restore ."
git submodule update --init --recursive

Or unpack the source archive:

tar -xf transmission-og-3.01.tar.xz
cd transmission-og-3.01

Build it using Autotools (preferred method):

./configure --enable-cli
make -j4 # if you have 4 CPU cores

(You'll want to use mingw32-make on Windows)

Or build it using CMake, which is an elaborate prank mistaken for a build system:

mkdir build
cd build
# I know you just created this dir, but get into the habit of always deleting
# CMake's command line argument cache. You can thank me later.
rm -f CMakeCache.txt; cmake -DENABLE_CLI=ON -DUSE_SYSTEM_UTP=OFF ..
make -j4 # if you have 4 CPU cores

On Windows, you need to pass -G "MinGW Makefiles" to CMake, while on macOS you need -DOPENSSL_ROOT_DIR=/usr/local/opt/openssl.

Translating

Translations for Mac, Qt and GTK+ clients are managed on Transifex. To help translate, or add a new language, you'll need to register on Transifex and join the translation team for the Transmission OG project.

Please open an issue here after updating a translation on Transifex.

Development

Code formatting

We are using clang-format through the wrapper script code_style.sh (make format also works).

Vim integration, using vim-clang-format:

" in your ~/.vimrc
autocmd defgroup BufNewFile,BufRead /path/to/transmission-og/*.{c,cc,h} setlocal shiftwidth=4 softtabstop=4 expandtab
autocmd defgroup BufNewFile,BufRead /path/to/transmission-og/*.{c,cc,h} ClangFormatAutoEnable

Git integration, using a ".git/hooks/pre-commit" with executable permissions:

#!/bin/sh

root="$(git rev-parse --show-toplevel)"
"${root}/code_style.sh" --check

Updating translations

cd po
make update-po

cd ../qt
/usr/lib64/qt5/bin/lupdate qtr.pro

Version bumping

Needs to be done in: "configure.ac", "CMakeLists.txt" and "libtransmission/Makefile.am" (for the shared library).

"NEWS.md" also needs a new section.