Recently it's been reported that Transmission 1.61 is now running on Haiku. This is thanks to Eric Petit (titer on IRC). Here is a mini interview I had with him.

1. Tell us a bit about yourself (i.e. Where are you from, how long have you been writing BeOS/Haiku Code etc...)

I live in Nantes, France. I started using BeOS 4.5 in 1999 or 2000. In 2001, I joined the VideoLAN project and, among other things, started helping Tony Castley with the BeOS port of VLC. I eventually maintained it for a few years.

I also started HandBrake in 2003 (first on BeOS, later ported to OS X/Linux) and Transmission in 2005. I am no longer active on those projects (roughly since I am no longer a student), but others have taken over, although the BeOS/Haiku versions are no longer maintained.

2. As of revision 30805 it appears that the latest version of Transmission (1.61) is now running on Haiku. What did it take to get this working? Did you have to port any other libraries/packages to get Transmission working?

In the last year, Haiku reached a state where it is actually usable for developers - the Haiku team has done a great job with that, so I thought it was about time I started contributing back. As it turns out, porting/updating new applications is a good way to stress-test various areas of the system and I am hoping it will help Haiku become a mature operating system. For instance, porting Transmission revealed a couple of small bugs in Haiku's network stack.

Having Transmission build and run on Haiku wasn't a huge task. I just had to workaround some build issues in Transmission itself and its dependency (libevent), and mmadia had already starting doing that. What took the most time was tracking down those small bugs I mentioned.

I still need to clean up my changes and do some more testing (so far I have only tried downloading files for a few minutes). Transmission 1.70 was just released, and I am hoping we can have an official Haiku port in a 1.7x point release.

3. Are there any plans on creating/porting a GUI for transmission (other than the web interface)?

Transmission used to have a native GUI for BeOS (written by Bryan Varner), but so much has changed since then in Transmission's core that it would probably be faster starting a new one from scratch. I don't plan on doing one myself - although I did my share of GUIs in the past, now I find it annoying :)

Like you said, people can use the web interface for now, which mimics a UI pretty well to let you control a Transmission daemon.

4. Are there any other applications that you are currently working on or plan to work on in the future?

VLC 1.0.0 sounds like the next obvious target. Scottmc is already working on it and I hope I can help. I expect it to be a much bigger job than Transmission, both because it is a bigger project (and has lots of dependencies) and because the current developers rely a lot on the OS implementing POSIX APIs. This has even been causing problems on OS X lately, so we will see how well Haiku behaves, and it may require changes/updates in Haiku itself.

I would also like to help with the PPC port of Haiku eventually, because I have an iBook G3 around that is quite struggling running OS X. Anything I can do to help the x86 version should probably come first, though.



Note from Eric: you'll indeed see Transmission running on Haiku r30805, but it actually requires r30896. I had only updated my kernel add-ons, which is why the About window still shows an older version.