qBittorent Keeps Crashing After a Few Minutes (Or Seconds)

Today qbittorrent kept crashing on me a lot. I noticed that it had quit on me before on this install of Debian Stable ("Wheezy") but had not been quite sure. After all, it's Debian, right? Debian Stable IS stable as a rock and all that, these things can't happen. Turns out, it's not really Debian's fault after all, although they could have made some fixed packages available or even better, provided an updated library in backports for those who need it. Let me explain.

qbittorrent exited so extraordinarily often today, sometimes even after only a few seconds, that I just had to start it from the terminal, hoping to get some verbose output to troubleshoot. We were not disappointed. Here's the hint that kept recurring and confirmed it was always the same issue.

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Catching SIGSEGV, please report a bug at http://bug.qbittorrent.org
and provide the following backtrace:
qBittorrent version: v2.9.8
stack trace:
  [0xb77c5400]
  /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/i686/cmov/libcrypto.so.1.0.0 : RC4()+0x9c  [0xb75e25dc]
Segmentation fault
barnabyh@debian-xfce:~$ qbittorrent
Couldn't set environment variable...
Peer ID: -qB2980-
HTTP user agent is qBittorrent v2.9.8


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A little search turned up a bug report on Github which lead to this little gem on the qbittorrent forum. Seems if your connections are set to require encryption this unstable behaviour sneaks in with (by now) old and newer versions of qbittorrent due to a bug in libtorrent6 (0.15). It is correct.that this is what I had done recently but had not noticed on my Sid install as Debian Unstable packs the newer 0.16.11 version of the library which has this ironed out. So it's not really a Debian specific issue at all but still, it could have been remedied.by backporting fixes and updating the library for "Wheezy" or (if that's not possible due to technical issues because 0.15 and 0.16 are too different, I'm not a programmer) at least offering an updated library in the backports section of the repositories which need to be explicitly enabled, together with a rebuilt qbittorrent.

One could of course also mix repos and update these selectively from Testing or Unstable, together with the additional packages this will draw in but I'ld rather not go down that road. Although I had pinned Clementine 1.1 previously to Unstable due to the improved integration for playback from online storage services. Shame, but it looks like for the time being I'll have to forego my torrenting client of choice on all distributions and installations and use something else. Flush looks quite good.but I still have yet to test it. It's also lacking options compared to qbittorrent but it is in the repository and is very light. Here's a short look at it in action if you like.

I'm of course aware of the other major GTK based alternatives, but neither Deluge nor Transmission ever worked well for me long-term. In the case of the first it actually never really worked. The desirable option is of course Ktorrent.which was a great option in KDE 3 days but I don't want to have to pull in half of KDE 4, including the phonon system, to run it. So thanks. Going back to more modularity in GNU/Linux would be nice.