Dash Core staging tree 0.12

https://www.dashpay.io

Copyright (c) 2009-2015 Bitcoin Core Developers

Copyright (c) 2014-2015 Dash Core Developers

What is Dash?

Dash is an experimental new digital currency that enables anonymous, instant payments to anyone, anywhere in the world. Dash uses peer-to-peer technology to operate with no central authority: managing transactions and issuing money are carried out collectively by the network. Dash Core is the name of open source software which enables the use of this currency.

For more information, as well as an immediately useable, binary version of the Dash Core software, see https://www.dashpay.io/downloads.

License

Dash Core 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 Dash development team members simply pulls it.

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.md) or are controversial.

The master branch is regularly built and tested, but is not guaranteed to be completely stable. Tags are created regularly to indicate new official, stable release versions of Dash. TODO

Testing

Testing and code review is the bottleneck for development; we get more pull requests than we can review and test on short notice. Please be patient and help out by testing other people's pull requests, 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 can be compiled and run (assuming they weren't disabled in configure) with: make check

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 DashPullTester. See https://github.com/TheBlueMatt/test-scripts for the build/test scripts. TODO

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/dashpay/QA/ for how to create a test plan. TODO

Translations

Changes to translations as well as new translations can be submitted to Bitcoin Core's Transifex page.

Translations are periodically pulled from Transifex and merged into the git repository. See the translation process for details on how this works.

Important: We do not accept translation changes as GitHub pull requests because the next pull from Transifex would automatically overwrite them again.

Translators should also subscribe to the mailing list. TODO

Development tips and tricks

compiling for debugging

Run configure with the --enable-debug option, then make. Or run configure with CXXFLAGS="-g -ggdb -O0" or whatever debug flags you need.

debug.log

If the code is behaving strangely, take a look in the debug.log file in the data directory; error and debugging messages are written there.

The -debug=... command-line option controls debugging; running with just -debug will turn on all categories (and give you a very large debug.log file).

The Qt code routes qDebug() output to debug.log under category "qt": run with -debug=qt to see it.

testnet and regtest modes

Run with the -testnet option to run with "play dash" on the test network, if you are testing multi-machine code that needs to operate across the internet.

If you are testing something that can run on one machine, run with the -regtest option. In regression test mode, blocks can be created on-demand; see qa/rpc-tests/ for tests that run in -regtest mode.

DEBUG_LOCKORDER

Dash Core is a multithreaded application, and deadlocks or other multithreading bugs can be very difficult to track down. Compiling with -DDEBUG_LOCKORDER (configure CXXFLAGS="-DDEBUG_LOCKORDER -g") inserts run-time checks to keep track of which locks are held, and adds warnings to the debug.log file if inconsistencies are detected.