giFTcurs

older news:

Our new page is up! Many thanks to nisse for designing this one too.

The CVS has been imported into Savannah now. Check below for how to get the new CVS repository.

We’re moving to Savannah! Things are kind of in flux right now. We’re waiting for SF to produce an updated tarball of the CVS before we move the code to Savannah. Stay tuned.

weinholt’s hostname is changing from fnord.hemmet.chalmers.se to fnord.csbnet.se, which means that the around 630 people who use the APT repository there will have to update their sources.list file. Of course this also applies to the mailing lists. The old domain will disappear in about two to four weeks.

Today we finally took the step over to glib-2.0. This enables us to keep the code clean. In other news, 64-bit integers are now used to reflect the increase in shared material on the networks.

giFTcurs 0.5.7 was released today. You can now exclude words from your search by placing a “-” before them. You can also specify your own search orders now, for both hits and transfers. See giFTcurs.conf(5) for instructions.

A mailing list for CVS commits has been created.
To join the commits mailing list, go here.

There hasn’t been a new release in a while, but now 0.5.6 is here! This release features a fix for a segfault, improved format strings, etc. Pressing “q” in anything but an input field will exit giFTcurs. This release should also run on BeOS and all Debian versions starting with “bo”. We also managed to build it on IBM OS/2 Warp 3, but ncurses refused to work.
In other news, an IRC channel and two mailing lists have been created. To join the channel, point your IRC client to irc.freenode.net and join #giFTcurs. To join the users’ mailing list, go here. To join the developers’ mailing list, go here.

No, giFTcurs is not dead. It’s just that it works very well right now, and only minor esthetic things have changed. A split of all curses/graphics stuff into a separate library is planned. This library will make use of glib2.

Sorry for the late release of 0.5.5. There was a protocol change and this release should have happened sooner.

We’re moving the apt repository to weinholt’s server now. It will hopefully be a bit faster than sourceforge. We’re also going to make .debs for Debian stable available in the apt repository. The new sources.list lines are as follows:
deb http://fnord.csbnet.se/giftcurs unstable main
deb-src http://fnord.csbnet.se/giftcurs unstable main
Replace unstable with stable if you have Debian stable. Please report any problems.

And the quick release of 0.5.4. Turns out the formats for the search results were broken. This release also fixes a small bug with transfers showing up wrong when giFT dies.

Yet another release, 0.5.3. This release has support for user defined formatting for the search results and transfers. See giFTcurs.conf(5) for more information.

We have started the big move over to user-defineable formats. This means that the files on cvs may be a bit unstable. This also means the memory footprint will be slightly larger. But when it’s finished it will be sweet, I promise!
The preliminary specification is in the beginning of format.c, your comments and suggestions are highly welcome before we decide on the syntax.

0.5.2 is out, you know the drill. This release fixes a nasty bug, which would result in odd behaviour when searching. And the interface protocol changed again... this time transfers were affected.

And now, finally, 0.5.1 has been released. Some highlights are that downloads are displayed properly, transfers are sorted and some basic meta data support is in. It may be a bit ugly, so don’t get too used to it.

Version 0.5.0 is released, the reason for the version increase is the new interface protocol that clients use to talk to the daemon. No new features, besides a number of small improvements of course. All users may want to upgrade, as 0.4 series doesn’t work any more. Still lacking some translations, but they will come in next release.

I (weinholt) am moving and I probably won’t have Internet access for about two weeks. This means that jasta will have implemented the new protocol before I’m back. I am therefore releasing a snapshot. Here.
Hopefully saturn will have gotten back before jasta merges the development branch though. If he has, he will release giFTcurs 0.5.0.
If you want to know more about the new interface protocol, here is the place to go.

(Note: this is only relevant to the CVS version.)
Debian unstable recently upgraded to gettext 0.11.4. This version introduces an anti-non-interactive script hack. I’ve committed an anti-anti-non-interactive script hack hack.
There also seems to be a missing macro in this version of gettext. I have reported this issue to the Debian BTS.

giFT is getting a new interface protocol. I’m checking in incompatible changes to the giFTcurs CVS. If you want to try the new protocol you also need a copy of giFT that supports it. cvs -z3 up -d -r dev-0_10_0-interface2-branch will move your working copy [of giFT] over to the right branch. cvs -z3 up -d -A will take it back to the main trunk.
[If you instead want your copy of giFTcurs to work with giFT CVS, cvs update -Pd -r Release-0_4_3. Later when giFT has changed to the new protocol, you may do this in your giFTcurs directory to get the latest: cvs -z3 up -d -A]

giFTcurs CVS now works with gettext 0.11.x. Thank you malverian.
(You might have to remove aclocal.m4 before you run autogen.sh.)

New in 0.4.3 is the button bar. To disable it, stick a “set buttonbar 0” in ~/.giFT/ui/giFTcurs.conf. Also the “X” key in the transfer screen was changed to “T”. Mostly because people complained that they accidentally cancelled transfers. Like this will stop them :)

Our cvs repository is currently unavailable due to a crashed cvs session. A support request has been sent to the sourceforge team to remove the lock files. Sorry for this.

The hardest part about releasing software is to come up with what to say in the announcements. Anyway, giFTcurs 0.4.2 is released. It has more sorting thingees and is much prettier. There’s also a new feature that allows you to pause/unpause downloads, just press “p” on it. giFT will automagically pause downloads if you’ve run out of disk space.

We’re not going to use glib in a while. It’s rather pointless right now to rewrite lots of stuff, since giFTcurs is pretty stable.
We’re about to release giFTcurs 0.4.2, but we’re waiting for updated translations to come in.

We’re thinking about using glib 2.0 in giFTcurs. Of course this means extra dependencies, but the code size will be much smaller, by using the routines from glib. If you have comments or suggestions, please discuss them with us in the forum. We will still have a branch for the non-glib version, but it will only be updated when there are protocol changes and such. According to “SLOCCount” by David A. Wheeler, this program has cost $ 170,973 to develop. :)

0.4.1 is out. This release includes a fix for a PowerPC-specific (we believe) segfault. There is also a new feature, the ability to log the hashes of started downloads to a file. This allows the user to run something like “md5sum -c .md5sum’ in the completed directory to verify downloads. Although this isn’t very usefull yet since there are giFT daemons out there that still hash only the first 300K of files. See giFTcurs.conf(5) for information about activating this feature.

Today we released 0.4.0. A big change is that search results and transfers can be expanded, with a tree like view. Just press “e” over a search result or a transfer. The default transfer reporting style was also changed to a style which jasta suggested. The original is still there, read giFTcurs.conf(5).

This is just a reminder for you to upgrade giFT to the latest CVS. We estimate that about 200 users (a significant amount) haven’t upgraded to the latest protocol yet. It’s important that you upgrade or it will be difficult to work on scalability issues and the quality of the network will degrade.
There will be no more reminders.

And then there was 0.3.4. Mostly because of a protocol change. There’s support for multiple searches now, just hit up/down in the query field. Also there’s gpm support and the code for saving settings was very much improved.

Today we relased 0.3.3. This release features an improved settings screen, proper mouse support (also the mouse wheel works with some terminals), searching among results (press “/”). There are as always other changes as well.

Nisse send us a new page layout, as you might have noticed. Looks alot like the old one, just nicer. Lots of stuff has been implemented lately, be sure to use the cvs if you want the cutting edge.

Both developers are away during this easter thingie. Weinholt will be back somewhere around the 4th of april.

If you’re wondering about the apparent decrease in users on OpenFT, it’s because there was a change in the protocol and the network is currenly split. Please update giFT to the latest CVS, as I hope you do regularly anyway.

Today we released 0.3.2. The major advantage over 0.3.1 is that downloading works with the CVS version of giFT :)

We released giFTcurs 0.3.1 today.

giFTcurs 0.3.0 released! New features include upload monitoring, search filtering, history, customizable colors and of course it follows the new daemon interface protocol.

giFT’s client-daemon protocol began to stabilize and you can expect a new release in near future. Just committed a huge bunch of things, although most of them not visible. In sweden we celebrate this palindrom-day by loosing against Belarus, and is therefore out from Olympic Games in hockey. Sad but real.

Yesterday weinholt decided to write a proof-of-concept client. It’s called giFTcmd and you’ll find it here. Usage is like “giFTsearch query | giFTchoose | giFTdownload”. It’s 200% bugs and you don’t want to use it. If you want something fixed you’ll have to fix it yourself.

giFT changed protocol again as foreseen below. Specify -D 2002-01-30 to cvs to get the latest version for the previous protocol. We are working on adopting the new (better) interface. Much improvements have been made, especially on the socket side.

We released 0.2.1 today. Mostly bug fixes and interface improvements. giFT pretty much sucks right now though, so you will probably not be able to use it for anything but searching.

We put up an apt-source today for all you Debian users:
deb http://giftcurs.sourceforge.net/debian unstable main
It also has sources so deb-src should work.

Version 0.2.0 of giFTcurs released. The giFT interface seems to fairy stable now and will hopefully last some weeks until it changes again. Remember this uses the OpenFT network, which has far less shares than the closed-source FT network (at least for the moment). Localization is now proven to work because weinholt made a translation to Swedish.

The CVS-version of giFTcurs can now download through giFT and show the status of downloads in the transfer screen.

Now we have a new (and better) design here. Thanks to Nisse for that one.

We decided to drop support for giFT 0.9.7, and instead target on the new giFT daemon (with OpenFT support) which has a different interface structure. This new giFTcurs will probably be given version 0.2.x.

Forgot to put a notice here, but we released giFTcurs 0.1.0 a little while ago. Download it here.

When the FastTrack protocol got changed, giFT became unable to connect to the network. Development will be slow until the giFT project has fixed this situation (or OpenFT is ready.)

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