Update on Deluge development

A long-awaited update and answer questions for those who continue to support Deluge, letting you know the state of development and what to expect in future.

First of all I hope that everyone is keeping safe and well in these chaotic and challenging times.

Since the last release of Deluge quite a lot changed for me, I am keeping well but I have new priorities meaning my time and energy to dedicate to Deluge has really stalled. It's quite astonishing how the weeks and months can slip by, even this post is weeks later than planned! 

Recently my time has been tied up in just maintaining the project that doesn't show as progress in the code so what I hope for the future of the project is to have more streamlined processes so it's easier to manage and enable quality contributions to the project. I am not sure what that will look like yet but in the meantime I'll outline a few of the main priorities I shall focus on.

Release 2.0.4

To get me back into the flow of development I want to get a new release out in the coming weeks. I think I will need to offload the packaging for all the OSs to other people such as the contributors who have worked hard to get Deluge working on Windows.

libtorrent 2.0 support

With the release of libtorrent 2.0 earlier in the year containing lots of changes and features it makes sense to start the transition to support it. It might take a while to add full support for the latest features and I don't know what incompatibilities lie ahead since Deluge core code is several versions behind.

Drop Python 2 support

I have already stopped running the unit tests since Python 2 is end-of-life but to simplify development we need to remove Python 2 support from the code entirely. 

Web UI 

The ExtJS 3 framework that the WebUI uses is very old, completely unsupported and really needs rewritten with something more modern. The main priority just now though is the XSS vulnerabilities that which I hope to find interim fixes for.

In summary there is more than enough to keep any team busy. I wish I could dedicate more time to Deluge, it's always at the back of my mind.

Thank you as always for your support!

Calum (Cas)