Download Halite 0.3.1.1

It’s been quiet around Halite for a while, but Binary Notions released a new version of its Bittorrent client yesterday. Halite, which takes its name from the eponymous mineral thanks, is open source and is being developed by the Irishman Eóin O’Callaghan. The program uses the Arvid Norberg created libtorrentlibrary and some boostlibraries. We do not find any new versions in this release. However, a number of stability problems are said to have been solved, problems that the programmer could not reproduce himself. The announcement of this release also mentions version 0.3.2, which, if all goes well, we can expect soon:

An overdue update

This 0.3.1.1 release really doesn’t add any new features, instead it is hopefully a fix for people who reported stability issues with the previous release.

The ‘hopefully’ part is because I could not reproduce the crashes which were being reported even working with someone who could tell me their exact setup. But after some work it seems the error is being caught. One thing people will notice is no logging build. Frankly the verbose logging is great for tracking down protocol issues not UI ones so those massive logs just weren’t helpful. Instead now a much broader class of errors are logged at runtime. So anyone seeing ‘Critical’ errors can report them to help catch bugs.

As for new features, well Halite 0.3.2 will be based on 0.14 libtorrent code which is still in progress. That said it has recently reached a stable enough state that I feel confident that a new snapshot could be released based on it. If I can get my act together that will be next week.[break]