WinMX Speaks – Interview

Thomas Mennecke

WinMX has always been at the forefront of P2P development. When its OpenNap support base took a back seat to the WPNP (WinMX Peer Networking Protocol), its popularity and resourcefulness soared to new heights. While the networks’ number 1 complaint remains the queuing situation, a grand process is in motion to resolve this and many other idiosyncrasies with the WinMX client. To settle many false rumors regarding the health and future of WinMX, we chatted with Frontcode President, Kevin Hearn. We thank him for taking the time to participate in this interview.

Slyck.com: What news can you give us regarding the latest developments of WinMX?

WinMX: Currently we are in the middle of a FULL re-write of the entire WinMX code base. This means the next version of WinMX we release (probably as v4.0) will be completely redesigned with several major improvements and several new features. While I can’t speculate on a completion date yet, I can tell you that we are working as quickly as possible and progress thus far has been good.

Slyck.com: A posting to the WinMX newsgroup, supposedly from Frontcode, stated that development has stopped. This caused some concern because the headers checked out as coming from Frontcodes’ IP. What insight can you give us?

WinMX: This is the first I have heard of this. We do not normally participate in _any_ newsgroup in any official capacity, nor do we regularly monitor the WinMX newsgroup. We only release official news on our web site.

Slyck.com: The delay has caused some concern. What can you tell us about this considerably delay?

WinMX:After v3.31 was released we did continue development of the v3 series. In fact, we got pretty far along in this development, almost to the point where we were ready to start beta testing a v3.4. However, during the late development stages it became more and more clear that we eventually needed to scrap the entire v3 core and start fresh, and that’s what we did. We’ve been working on a fresh new WinMX for the past several months now, and it is coming along very well.

Slyck.com: Regarding the next release, what new features can we look forward to? Any radical departures from the current client? Perhaps some resolution to the “queue problem?”

Interview

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5. The Future of WinMX