Transmission, one of the best-known open-source BitTorrent clients on Linux, has been forked into a new project called ReTransmission following a longstanding disagreement among its maintainers over how to manage the project.
The fact that the fork existed was established during a discussion on Transmission’s official GitHub repository, when users began asking why a separate ReTransmission project had emerged.
Charles Kerr, who has long been one of the developers and maintainers of Transmission, says:
“There are several reasons, but the easiest one to explain quickly is it solves a longstanding disagreement between the Transmission maintainers on whether or not to add more maintainers.”
Kerr also states that ReTransmission is still in its early stage and that signed binaries are not yet available. He also mentioned that a more detailed announcement about the situation is planned for when the fork starts issuing actual releases.
The full Transmission codebase and development history are already present in a new Git repository. The new fork identifies itself as a BitTorrent client for Linux, macOS, and Windows, and it retains Transmission’s well-known GTK and Qt desktop interfaces, the macOS and Windows applications, the headless daemon, the command-line tools, and the web interface.
Development is already underway in the separate retransmission GitHub organization, and nightly source builds are also taken from the project’s repository.
The most important question still open is as to what effect the fork will have on Transmission itself. As talk surrounding the announcement picked up, several questions arose about whether Transmission will remain the main project, how fixes and new features will be transferred between the two codebases, and whether keeping two closely related projects will result in extra work for developers.
At present, there are no definite answers to those questions, but as always, we’ll keep an eye on a fork and how things unfold there.
Transmission has been available for many years as a lightweight and widely used BitTorrent client, especially among users of Linux and macOS, and, because of its daemon and web interface, it has also become popular on servers, NAS devices, and other headless systems.
For now, Transmission users have no need to make any changes. Since ReTransmission is still a young branch without a regular release channel, Kerr has stated that a proper announcement with more details will be made when releases start.
However, for now it is still unclear what will happen afterward—whether ReTransmission will become a fully independent BitTorrent client or whether the two projects will continue to develop side by side.
This use to be one o the 1st things I would uninstall on distros that came with it since I do not trust torrents or the software.