[Proposal] Create .torrent (with Bitcoin url support)

[gubatron]

Hi there, I was at first wondering if you'd be interested in receiving a pull request with an enhanced "Create .torrent" dialog that would enable qBittorrent users to specify donations/tips urls.

I just tried the app for the first time and I believe you don't have a feature to create .torrents yet.

I'd like to volunteer to create such feature, it'd look a lot like the one I implemented for FrostWire.

Torrent contents, tracking, web seeds

Donations/Tips support (would do Bitcoin and any URL), the enhanced .torrent info dictionary would be compatible with FrostWire's proposed specs

Adding licensing info (probably not for first pull request)

Is this something you guys would like to have in your client?

[sorokin]

Personally I like both these features. I wonder if they would be widely used or not.

I don't know the best way to integrate them in the current torrent creation dialog. Or should this dialog be redesigned in someway.

[gubatron]

@sorokin for the life of me I could not find the current dialog (as a user, so I didn't search for it in the code), please tell me where it is in the UI to take a look.

[sorokin]

I have it as a first item in Tools menu:

I uses git master.

[gubatron]

oh! thank you (should probably have that in Files)

[gubatron]

beautiful, I'd just put the current widget as the first page of a QTabWidget and add the rest.

[sorokin]

Before you get started I think we should wait for a maintainer to answer if he is ready to accept this change.

[gubatron]

sure, thanks for letting me know.

[sledgehammer999]

And where would you put the license/tip info? In the comment section?

[gubatron]

no, if you want license, it'd be a tab of its own, as in the case of picking a creative commons license it's not that simple (you have to give attribution, and you want the user to acknowledge they're not going to be faking someone else's identity)

check the screenshots @sledgehammer999

[sledgehammer999]

No I didn't mean visually. I meant how the actual .torrent file is constructed and where in the file are the licensing/tips info saved. The comment section of the file? AFAIK, the torrent specification doesn't have separate sections for licensing/tips.

[sorokin]

Here is some documentation: https://github.com/frostwire/frostwire-desktop/wiki/Extending-a-Torrent's-info-map-with-Cryptocurrency-Wallet-addresses-and-a-Creative-Commons-license.-BitTorrent-meets-Bitcoin#integrating-licensing-and-crypto-wallet-metadata-into-the-torrent

[gubatron]

check this torrent, not in the comment's section. it's much better to have a formal abstraction. It has it's own dictionaries, one for licensing, another for payments/tips.

They go inside info, so they cannot be tampered without changing the infohash of the .torrent.

Here's an example torrent info from a real torrent (depicted in JSON):

{
//all other info fields, and then the new ones  
...
paymentOptions : {
   'bitcoin' : 'bitcoin:14F6JPXK2fR5b4gZp3134qLRGgYtvabMWL',    
   'paypalUrl' : 'http://www.frostwire.com/give',    
   'isDct' : true
   } ,
license : {  
   'open-source' :   {   'attributionAuthor' : 'FrostWire LLC',    
                                  'attributionTitle' : 'FrostWire 6.0.0',    
                                  'attributionUrl' : 'http://www.frostwire.com',    
                                  'licenseUrl' : 'https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html',    
                                 'isDct' : true }
   } ,
name.utf-8 : 'frostwire-6.0.0.windows.coc.premium.exe'  
}

Here's the sample torrent if you want to see the bencoding, or bedecode for yourself http://dl.frostwire.com/frostwire/6.0.0/frostwire-6.0.0.windows.coc.premium.exe.torrent

[sledgehammer999]

-I didn't actually read the links yet- Next question: Is anybody else(client) supporting this? Because we'll have users complain "utorrent doesn't display my licensing info to end users" etc. And we might end up implementing a feature that will never be useful. Note: I am not against it yet.

[gubatron]

no it'd be only frostwire and qbittorrent, so I thought the best way to get adoption is me building this for every client that's willing to accept it. utorrent is not open, so it will be a matter of all open clients implementing this and then people will ask them to include it.

I'll also be implementing an open source (simple) command line tool based on libtorrent, that allows you to create bitcoin enabled torrents, this way it's less effort/lazyness for other developers to have the feature.

[sledgehammer999]

I think I am positive to this. I need to study the links. If I don't answer in a few days feel free to ping me again the coming weekend.