Sometimes you have a need to stay current with upstream releases, even though you would like to rely on the stability of your base distribution. Here is how this can be accomplished in a "quick and dirty" fashion. Lines starting with a # have to be executed as root, lines starting with $ should be run as a regular user.
Traditionally libevent is also needed, but Transmission depends on version numbers only rarely found in Debian. So let us start by compiling libevent in a directory of your choice. Browse to https://libevent.org/ and get the latest version.
Now, we would really like to be able to upgrade to a new version in the future, so there should be a mechanism other than the classic "make install" which keeps count of what went where (and ideally this is not a piece of paper). So we build a very simple Debian package from the compiled files and install it. Basically you just enter the following command and hit return until a nice text message tells you that all is done.
_Thanks to josen at https://falkhusemann.de/blog/2012/05/compiling-transmission-bittorrent-for-debiand/ for the original Debian Squeeze HowTo section._
No patches needed(\*), all the recent versions of Transmission build almost out-of-the-box (you need to install the prerequisites), and the CLI tools work better under Cygwin than those built with MinGW.
(\*) At the release time of version 2.0, **libevent** is not bundled and it is also not in the Cygwin distribution (but was added later)... so you need to build it (which is as easy as ./configure, make install). To build Transmission you may need to add LDFLAGS="-L/usr/local/lib" to the configure script (LIBEVENT_LIBS does not seem to work when it comes to build all the test programs). Additionally **libutp** needs deleting -ansi on the Makefile.
Version 2.80 breaks building on Cygwin, adding this https://github.com/adaptivecomputing/torque/blob/master/src/resmom/cygwin/quota.h file to Cygwin's /usr/include/sys solves the problem. This is no longer needed after version 2.82 (Cygwin added the header).
Version 2.81 with the above workaround needs a one line patch, see ticket #5692.
Version 2.82, same as 2.81.
Version 2.83, no need to add quota.h, Cygwin added it.
With a MinGW https://mingw.org/ development environment, the GTK and the Qt GUI applications can be built. The CLI tools can also be built and in general work fine, but may fail if you use foreign characters as parameters (MinGW uses latin1 for parameters).
The Transmission `./configure` (or `./autogen.sh`) script allows you to switch on/off certain parts. To use these, you will either use `--enable-*` or `--disable-*`, e.g. to disable the GTK client: `--disable-gtk`.
Note: _`--disable-nls` removes the dependency on gettext and intltool. It is designed for and should only be used on [HeadlessUsage embedded devices]. If you do have GTK+ installed on your box, you must also specify `--disable-gtk`._
