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.