The btmount program (in Alpha stage) now allows users to mount a torrent as a file system.
While this capability is novel, it's still very early in it's implementation. To be truely effective, the BitTorrent protocol must be significantly modified to provide good support for large sets of small files that change often.
To use the new btmount, users could issue the following commands:
% btmount
btmount> r btslave.torrent
btmount> mount 1 /home/bill/temp
btmount>... read more
Now supporting:
-- Compact tracker mode
-- Tracker keys
-- Restart partial downloads
-- Upload rate limit
This release basically completes the intended feature set of the basic BTSlave, prior to enhancements to support the new BT Friends protocol.
The BTSlave BitTorrent client can now acts as a BitTorrent repeater. In repeater mode, BTSlave downloads only as much data as needed to keep peers interested in uploading. In it's first test, BTSlave rocketed to an upload/download ratio of 9.8 within minutes.
To aid in the rapid development of the new BT friends protocol, a new BT client is under development, called BTSlave.
Today, it downloaded its first file successfully from a torrent.