End of dev blog

Recently I find it hard to take the time to write about the development - I don't want to just copy the changelog here, so I'll stop writing for now. Please track the forums for current developments.

memory usage, EC, ed2k and categories

I'll keep this shorter and more user related in the future and will not refer to small changes or bug fixes, unless they affect the user directly.

In the last month, Freddy77 wrote many patches with the effect of a reduced memory usage for aMule. This will make run aMule better on embedded devices with little RAM.

We changed the EC (External Connections) authentication procedure to improve security. New developmental versions (and the future 2.3.0) are incompatible to 2.2.3 and older, so you need newer versions of both aMule/amuled and amuleGUI, amuleweb or any other tools using EC.

The ed2k utility supports finally categories. If you have custom scripts, you can now use the -t or --category argument in combination with the category number to add a link to a particular category. (Example: ed2k -t 1 ed2k://|file|...|/)
You can find the category numbers in the configuration file amule.conf.

If you don't want to use ed2k, you can add these information directly to the ED2KLinks file in the aMule config directory. Append a colon and the category number to the link.

Code restructuring, small configure changes, more work on Cocoa GUI

Stu Redman has worked on part file code and improved it greatly and also put the gap list code into a new class. He worked on other code fixing many warnings and improving code quality. Furthermore he fixed a crash related to resizing progress bars and their wrong displaying in the remote gui.

Static linking of GeoIP on mingw works now, thanks to a fix by GonoszTopi after a report by iz0bbz. GonoszTopi also improved our documentation, fixed a problem involving network initialization and version check, worked on code readability and provided a better user experience by supporting another ed2k link scheme and switching to a busy cursor when opening preferences.

There have been some small improvements to the configure script; xas is now optional and skins will only be installed when necessary.

lfroen continued working on the Cocoa GUI, it seems to shape up quite nicely, including all major functionality.

Development summary, firewall without ed2k

If you follow our SVN version, you might have realized that there are more Kad infos displayed (even on amulegui) and no more server information when ed2k is disabled leading to a better user interface.

Talking about ed2k being disabled: If you don't use ed2k, there's no need to forward the UDP port with the TCP+3 port number. It's only used for communication with the server.

Crashes related to the tray icon on 64 bit should be fixed now, as well as crashes when closing search tabs on GTK systems. (Thanks to Stu Redman and GonoszTopi)

Furthermore there have been many code optimizations which should make things like opening the preferences on windows, drawing progress bars, corruption handling and part files faster and aMule easier on your CPU - particularly if your computer is a bit older.

Error checking related to GeoIP has been improved and there have been more changes to better compatibility with older systems and the bourne shell and sharing of finished file should now work without problems, too.

Last, but not least there are more changes to External Connections and lfroen's continued work on a Cacoa remote gui seem to be shaping up nicely, both changes to be excited about.

New tarball format, imminent 2.2.3, new developments

After the reorganization, we introduced a new tarball format based on the developer's revisions. The tarball name aMule-SVN-r9240.tar.bz2 includes the revision "9240" (the 9240th change to aMule) - the higher the revision number the more recent the code change.

Prior to releases we offer tarballs with prerelease code (in lieu for a Release Candidate), those are labeled with "RELEASE-2_2_X" or similar while the current development is labeled "trunk". The release tarball may have a higher revision number than the trunk tarball, don't let this confuse you.

You can download tarballs from the temporary download page at http://amule.uw.hu/tarballs/.

Thanks to Gnucco, we have a public GIT repository at http://repo.or.cz/w/amule.git , which makes it easier to track changes. Thank you, Gnucco!


Furthermore, we're nearing the release of aMule 2.2.3 - if you can, test the provided tarball to help us to provide a new stable version of aMule.


On the new developments side, lfroen continues working on a Cacoa-Gui for aMule, Stu Redman is successfully hunting little bugs, making sure aMule runs and builds fine everywhere. He rewrote the client speed calculation and fixed the core timer and the download limit.
GonoszTopi fixed handling of invalid KAD pakets and is generally busy preparing the 2.2.3 release.

migration status

As you might already know, late September the hirnriss.net server was shut down, permanently. Since then we have successfully moved the Subversion repository to another server, and slowly services are coming back to online.

However, development didn't stall meanwhile. Stu Redman committed a complete logger rework, and as a temporary tarball server has been set up, user-contributed minor bugfixes came back, too.

webserver template change, small changes

Starting with tomorrow's tarball, only one webserver template will be shipped with aMule - the wonderful litoral design by GeVauDan and Gulp.


This is a first step to improve amuleweb making it a very stable application, which ultimately should be able to support this awesome template concept by GeVauDan.
The name of the skin has been changed to "default" - amuleweb might have to adjust config file.


A couple of small fixes have been committed, too. The progress bar in amuleweb for files > 4GB has been fixed, Stu Redman has committed patches to disable warnings for MSVC builds and for automatic geoip.dat download using the RemoteGUI as well as a compilation fix for the RemoteGUI on MSW when IP2Country was disabled.