This pertains to KTorrent 2.1 on KDE 3.5.6.
I know it's old but maybe the user confusion I experienced may still be interesting. KTorrent has worked pretty well for me so far, so thankyou for that.

I used KTorrent to download a Fedora ISO some while ago, the file was completed successfully, and I burned it to DVD. OK.
Today, I opened up KTorrent to download something else, and noticed the old file in the list. The status of the old ISO was "Not started".
"Oh?" I thought to myself, "it must have been one of those other downloads I had started that failed or went too slowly."
I thought that I should (and did) remove the item from the list.
KTorrent popped up a dialog (that would normally be helpful, and could have saved me, except for the sway of the misconception I was under), asking whether to just remove the entry or both the entry and the *data*. I selected remove both, and suddenly thought, "what if I'm wrong?", so I rushed konqueror to the file location just in time to see it disappear before my eyes. :)

So I think I can lay blame for my misconception on the "Not started" state that was displayed. I don't use KTorrent very often, so I was "fresh from the outside". I presume each download goes through various states as the download progresses, having a start, a middle and an end. "Not started" sounds like it's somewhere near the start. So that made me think that the file was not complete. Did KTorrent not remember that the file had been completed? Is the "not started" state relevant to KTorrent only in the current session, as a more internalish socket state?

Anyway, that's my story, hopefully it's useful and still relevant.
Thanks again.

Not started = Not started by user


It has nothing do with the completeness of a torrent

Also, nobody ever complained about this before, so I'm guessing most people do not get confused by it.

Well, thankyou for your quick reply.
Now I'm more interested !

Could you verify my understanding of the meaning;
Does "Not started [by user]" include the qualifying meaning "only during this session" ?

I started, downloaded and finished the torrent a long time ago. "Not started" seems to flatly contradict that.

I can well understand the difficulty in coming up with nice, short status codes, but when something's too short, it can mislead. (Especially a noob like me.)

When I was designing a simple downloader of my own, I thought about having two status columns, one for the file status, which is persistent, and one for the port status, which is more volatile and more an internal implementation detail.
A quick glance by a user should find the file status first, and not be concerned with the current port status (ports come and ports go), but then, when you want the more specific port information, you definitely want it.

This is just a very tentative idea I'm tossing in that *might* fit in with how ktorrent does things.

My apologies for nitpicking this very good software, and thanks again for creating it.

Best Regards,

Anton.