qBittorrent needs help on Windows front

[Copernic Reporter]

Hi,

qBittorrent was downloaded 145 000 times last month on Sourceforge and almost 80 percent of those downloads are for Windows. I keep gettings emails from users moving away from uTorrent and looking towards qBittorrent as an alternative. This is really encouraging!

There is however a serious lack of Windows developers in the project. SledgeHammer who is our only Windows developer has been idle for quite some time due to personal reasons. Mkdib is nice enough to package new builds of qBittorrent for Windows but he does not have time to do more (testing, fixing bugs or adding features). I personally don't even have a machine running Windows and I'm already taking care of Linux and Mac OS X platforms.

qBittorrent is a truly Open Source project, and as such, anyone can and should contribute to it. I'm therefore reaching out to the community asking for more people to contribute, especially on Windows platform. ANY help would be welcome and I will do my best to bring the newcomers up to speed so that they can become productive in a timely fashion. If WE don't do anything about the situation, qBittorrent will become less stable on Windows or worse, it will no longer be compatible.

Here is all you need to know to contribute code:

• The GIT repository is located at http://git.qbittorrent.org, it is hosted on github which has a nice way for making pull requests and review patches.
  
• The documentation to help people build qBittorrent on Windows is there.
  
• The bug tracker has a lot of open tickets, a lot of those for Windows and is located at http://bugs.qbittorrent.org.
  
• I'm easily reachable by email if anyone needs help getting started and I promise to review patches promptly.
  

If you cannot contribute code, any help to make qBittorrent more stable on Windows is welcome. Finding bugs on Windows is of course useful. Providing me with debug backtraces in case of crashes or pointing me in the right direction in the code would be even better. Being able to test bug fixes would also be appreciated.

I am aware of the following issues on Windows that need addressing:

• There is no way to provide a useful bug report on Windows in case of a crash. A lot of programs on Windows show a dialog asking the user if they want to report the crash and the tool will file a bug report by itself and attach the code dumps / backtrace to it. Without a way of getting at least the backache, it is extremely difficult to debug crashers.
  
• The search angine gets easily broken on Windows, probably due to issues with installs of Python and problems detecting python executable and its location.
  
• There are still encoding issues when using international languages such as Chinese and Arabic.
  
• It is likely that paths are sometimes displayed using slashes as separators instead of backslashes.
  
• The installer should open the ports on the firewall (I don't think it does currently).
  
• We do not have 64bit builds.
  

There are probably many other things you can find or think of. I really hope you guys can help make a better experience for qBittorrent users on Windows.

Source: qBittorrent Forum