Bitcoin integration/staging tree ================================ http://www.bitcoin.org Copyright (c) 2009-2012 Bitcoin Developers What is Bitcoin? ---------------- Bitcoin is an experimental new digital currency that enables instant payments to anyone, anywhere in the world. Bitcoin uses peer-to-peer technology to operate with no central authority: managing transactions and issuing money are carried out collectively by the network. Bitcoin is also the name of the open source software which enables the use of this currency. For more information, as well as an immediately useable, binary version of the Bitcoin client sofware, see http://www.bitcoin.org. License ------- Bitcoin is released under the terms of the MIT license. See `COPYING` for more information or see http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT. Development process ------------------- Developers work in their own trees, then submit pull requests when they think their feature or bug fix is ready. If it is a simple/trivial/non-controversial change, then one of the Bitcoin development team members simply pulls it. If it is a *more complicated or potentially controversial* change, then the patch submitter will be asked to start a discussion (if they haven't already) on the [mailing list](http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum_name=bitcoin-development). The patch will be accepted if there is broad consensus that it is a good thing. Developers should expect to rework and resubmit patches if the code doesn't match the project's coding conventions (see `doc/coding.txt`) or are controversial. The `master` branch is regularly built and tested, but is not guaranteed to be completely stable. [Tags](https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/tags) are created regularly to indicate new official, stable release versions of Bitcoin. Testing ------- Testing and code review is the bottleneck for development; we get more pull requests than we can review and test. Please be patient and help out, and remember this is a security-critical project where any mistake might cost people lots of money. ### Automated Testing Developers are strongly encouraged to write unit tests for new code, and to submit new unit tests for old code. Unit tests for the core code are in `src/test/`. To compile and run them: cd src; make -f makefile.unix test Unit tests for the GUI code are in `src/qt/test/`. To compile and run them: qmake BITCOIN_QT_TEST=1 -o Makefile.test bitcoin-qt.pro make -f Makefile.test ./bitcoin-qt_test Every pull request is built for both Windows and Linux on a dedicated server, and unit and sanity tests are automatically run. The binaries produced may be used for manual QA testing -- a link to them will appear in a comment on the pull request posted by 'BitcoinPullTester'. See `https://github.com/TheBlueMatt/test-scripts` for the build/test scripts. ### Manual Quality Assurance (QA) Testing Large changes should have a test plan, and should be tested by somebody other than the developer who wrote the code. See `https://github.com/bitcoin/QA/` for how to create a test plan.