neobytes/doc/release-notes.txt
2013-02-10 22:50:21 +01:00

100 lines
4.1 KiB
Plaintext

(note: this is a temporary file, to be added-to by anybody, and deleted at
release time)
Building this from
$ git shortlog --no-merges v0.7.1..
Incompatible Changes
--------------------
This release no longer maintains a full index of historical transaction ids
by default, so looking up an arbitrary transaction using the getrawtransaction
RPC call will not work. If you need that functionality, you must run once
with -txindex -reindex to rebuild block-chain indices (see below for more
details).
Improvements
------------
Mac and Windows binaries are signed with certificates owned by the Bitcoin
Foundation, to be compatible with the new security features in OSX 10.8 and
Windows 8.
LevelDB, a fast, open-source, non-relational database from Google, is
now used to store transaction and block indices. LevelDB works much better
on machines with slow I/O and is faster in general. Berkeley DB is now only
used for the wallet.dat file (public and private wallet keys and transactions
relevant to you).
Pieter Wuille implemented many optimizations to the way transactions are
verified, so a running, synchronized node uses much less memory and does
much less I/O. He also implemented parallel signature checking, so if you
have a multi-CPU machine all CPUs will be used to verify transactions.
New Features
------------
"Bloom filter" support in the network protocol for sending only relevant transactions to
lightweight clients.
contrib/verifysfbinaries is a shell-script to verify that the binary downloads
at sourceforge have not been tampered with. If you are able, you can help make
everybody's downloads more secure by running this occasionally to check PGP
signatures against download file checksums.
contrib/spendfrom is a python-language command-line utility that demonstrates
how to use the "raw transactions" JSON-RPC api to send coins received from particular
addresses (also known as "coin control").
New/changed settings (command-line or bitcoin.conf file)
--------------------------------------------------------
dbcache : now controls LevelDB memory usage. Running with (for example) -dbcache=1000
will use a gigabyte of memory and might make the initial blockchain download faster.
par : controls how many threads to use to validate transactions. Defaults to the number
of CPUs on your machine, use -par=1 to limit to a single CPU.
txindex : maintains an extra index of old, spent transaction ids so they will be found
by the getrawtransaction JSON-RPC method. Can only be set when the database is
initialized.
reindex : rebuild block and transaction indices from the downloaded block data.
New JSON-RPC API Features
-------------------------
lockunspent / listlockunspent allow locking transaction outputs for a period of time so
they will not be spent by other processes that might be accessing the same wallet.
addnode / getaddednodeinfo methods, to connect to specific peers without restarting.
importprivkey now takes an optional boolean parameter (default true) to control whether
or not to rescan the blockchain for transactions after importing a new private key.
gettxout retrieves a single transaction output from the current set of unspent outputs.
Optionally, the mempool transactions are taken into account.
gettxoutsetinfo calculates statistics about the current set of unspent outputs.
Important Bug Fixes
-------------------
Privacy leak: the position of the "change" output in most transactions was not being
properly randomized, making network analysis of the transaction graph to identify
users' wallets easier.
Zero-confirmation transaction vulnerability: accepting zero-confirmation transactions
(transactions that have not yet been included in a block) from somebody you do not
trust is still not recommended, because there will always be ways for attackers to
double-spend zero-confirmation transactions. However, this release includes a bug
fix that makes it a little bit more difficult for attackers to double-spend a
certain type ("lockTime in the future") of zero-confirmation transaction.
Dependency Changes
------------------
Qt 4.8.3 (compiling against older versions of Qt 4 should continue to work)