Mainline bittorrent allows for the creation of trackerless torrents, which appear to just be torrents with no specified trackers. I think KTorrent's, torrent creator should allow for no tracker to be specified, also.

You have to put a bunch of IP addresses of DHT nodes in the torrent, so you can get connected to the DHT network (in case you do not know any nodes).

At the moment I don't have any time to do this.

Is that a required field of trackerless torrents, or can it be left blank? For now just the ability to create a torrent with no specified trackers would be a great thing to have.

jdong wrote:Is that a required field of trackerless torrents, or can it be left blank? For now just the ability to create a torrent with no specified trackers would be a great thing to have.

It is essential, how else are you gonna get connected to the DHT network if you do not know any nodes ?

Maybe just let KTorrent acquire peers from already running DHT. I think I understand what John is trying to say. Let's say we have a torrent with one tracker which is not connectable at the moment. By starting this torrent KT won't be able to get peers from tracker but it could get them from DHT (happened to me a milion times). So, for this scenario we would only need to allow 'tracker' field to be blank when creating a torrent.

Offcourse, it would be *very* hard to find other nodes if they are not included in torrent. The possibility will grow with that torrent popularity but it's something we can't count on too much

Yeah, Ivan hit the nail on the head.

I know that not specifying any nodes significantly drops the chances of finding a decent number of peers via DHT, but in my experience DHT has been able to do it before, several time for me, even on random unpopular torrents with 10 or so peers/seeds.

Either way, I don't see how this ability would "hurt" anything, as right now to create a 'trackerless' torrent via KTorrent I would specify a phony tracker, and often times those torrents actually work

Well, maybe we should do it right from the start instead of making a quick hack now and then doing it properly later.

Maybe you're right. For now, we can always put a fake tracker address to get the same thing...

Ivan wrote:Maybe you're right. For now, we can always put a fake tracker address to get the same thing...

Maybe we can still add it for 2.1, all we need is a list of IP addresses and port numbers. So some minor additions to the dialog and a some small modifications to save these parameters in the torrent file.

I currently am looking at the memory leaks and some other bugs. Would you have the time to do this ?

Yeah, no problem. I'll email you for the details.

Okay, I've just committed. KTorrent can make trackerless torrents with included DHT nodes as from now!
Check it out in SVN trunk.

Ooh, very cool

One thing though, what nodes should be put into the dialog? Most other clients will prefill with their router.whatever.com, or prefill with 10 random nodes from their routing table.

I haven't thought about this. Seems that you're right, according to specs on Bittorrent.org:

This key should be set to the K closest nodes in the torrent generating client's routing table. Alternatively, the key could be set to a known good node such as one operated by the person generating the torrent.

I'll see if I can extract some random nodes and prefill the dialog.

I'm curious about this part, though:

Please do not automatically add "router.bittorrent.com" to torrent files or automatically add this node to clients routing tables.

Does this apply to bittorrent.com router (reducing server load or whatever) or is there a good reason why we shouldn't add router.ktorrent.org when it's ready?

I think they just don't want everyone to be stressing their node... because the official BitTorrent client certainly doesn't practice what the specs preach

Okay, I've just committed. KTorrent will prefill nodes listView with max 10 closest good nodes when creating trackerless torrents.

Feel free to try it!