Dear Maintainer,

I just upgraded my Debian Bookworm desktop installation to the new
stable, Trixie. After starting up Transmission I noticed that many of my
torrents were blocked by their respective trackers with a message
indicating an unsupported client. The version shipped in Bookworm
worked with all of these.

Researching the problem I realized that Debian now ships a beta-version
of the client, 4.1.0-beta.2. Looking at the upstream release comment
(GitHub) it has this to say:

 "This is Transmission 4.1.0-beta.2. We're not in feature freeze yet,
  so this release includes some new features as well as bugfixes and
  performance improvements."

This creates an immediate problem for me: Unstable beta clients are not
allowed on some torrent trackers. I'm not sure how to solve this, other
than remove Debian's version and build a stable version from source.

The second problem is: Are we now stuck with this beta version? Debian
stable shouldn't have any feature changes, and Transmission explicitly
says this can still happen before a stable 4.1.0. Traditionally Debian
solves this by extracting bug-fix and security patches from upstream,
but that means we're still reporting a beta version to the trackers.

The best option for me would be an update to 4.1.0 proper when released,
hoping that will be soon.

Hi,

We did not anticipate this when we took this decision last january.
trixie will be stuck with this version. Last stable binaries are
available[1]. You can go back to this version and pin it.

I'm taking note that it is a bad idea to include a beta transmission
version in stable.

[1] http://snapshot.debian.org/package/transmission/4.0.6%2Bdfsg-3/

We surely will provide a backport the soonest after 4.1.0 is released.
No clear upstream timeline on this though...

Happy to help you in any way you might need it.

Alex

Thank you, after filing the bug report I did some research on my own
and came to the same conclusion about what happened. In summary,
development of Transmission ground to a halt for various reasons and
there are a few threads about it in their issue tracker, with a lot of
users and developers asking what's going on.

Having a backported 4.1.0 stable would solve the situation for most
people since backports are so easy to use.

Thank you for linking to the binaries. I found the 4.0.6+dfsg-3
sources yesterday on another website, and built it successfully. I've
used it for a while, but maybe I'd rather use the "official" binary
packages.

Just a short update on the situation with upstream Transmission. The
primary maintainer has resumed work on Transmission and posted this
comment last week:

"The plan is to have the next beta out in early November, and to have
4.1.0 out either later this year or early next year."

(https://github.com/transmission/transmission/issues/7623#issuecomment-3451652595)