Dolda Connect - README Introduction Dolda Connect is a peer-to-peer file sharing program, designed around the Direct Connect protocol. It is written in a fashion that is intended for flexibility and easy extension. It currently only supports the normal Direct Connect protocol, but support is also planned for the ADC protocol, and it can most likely be made to support a great deal of other file sharing protocols as well. Extensibility Dolda Connect is built around a client-server model, in the way that there is a server (daemon) program carrying out all the actual file-sharing work, and a number of client programs that connect to the server in order to command it and display its status. The interaction between the client and server is carried out using a well-defined protocol, making it fairly easy to write new clients for specialized tasks. It is worthy of note that the default configuration file disables running clients over the network, for convenience of setup. See the INSTALL file for details and instructions on how to enabled networked clients. To make it easier to write new clients, a C library has been written to make common functions easier, such as connecting, authenticating, sending requests and parsing the responses. The C library also has a wrapper module for GNU Guile, so that clients can be written in Scheme. As of 0.3, there is also a Python module available seperately. None of these are documented (yet), but there are a number of examples scattered around the source tree, so it should not be awfully hard to figure out how to do simple things. If in doubt, just contact the author. Clients So far, the following clients are distributed along with the source tree: * A Gtk2 based GUI, which loosely resembles a normal Direct Connect client program. * A GNOME panel applet for showing the status of current downloads in progress. * A Gaim/Pidgin chat plugin for chatting in hubs and writing private messages (only for Gaim 2.0.0 and above). * A command-line automatic downloader written in Scheme. * A chat logger written in Scheme. * A hub manager written in Scheme. The GNOME applet and Gaim plugin are somewhat experimental. Both work fairly well, but they do require special care during installation, since neither GNOME nor Gaim/Pidgin usually look for applets/plugins in the directories where Dolda Connect gets installed by default. See the files doc/INSTALL.applet and doc/INSTALL.gaim for further details. Installation See the doc/INSTALL file. Documentation Documentation is still rather weak, but it is getting better. Besides the README and INSTALL* files, there are now manpages for a number of the constituent programs. For any information still not found, please do not hesitate to contact the author. Any further documentation aside from this README file is located in the `doc' directory. Credits Dolda Connect is primarily written by Fredrik Tolf. He can be reached through the e-mail address <fredrik@dolda2000.com>. His homepage is <http://www.dolda2000.com/~fredrik/>. This document was last updated 2008-02-14, reflecting release 1.1 of Dolda Connect.