d3908e2cee
0bd2ec5 Improve formatting of developer notes (Evan Klitzke) Pull request description: The developer notes file has gotten pretty large and unwieldly. This reorganizes some content, most notably by adding a TOC to the page. Compare how the page looks in [my branch](https://github.com/eklitzke/bitcoin/blob/developer-notes/doc/developer-notes.md) vs [master](https://github.com/eklitzke/bitcoin/blob/master/doc/developer-notes.md). I know there's long-term interest in moving a lot of this content to the bitcoin-core/docs repo on GitHub, but this makes things better now. The TOC format here is a semi-standard extension to Markdown files that you may have seen on GitHub pages in other projects. The `<!-- markdown-toc -->` comments used by these tools to know where the TOC starts/ends. The following tools all understand this format: * [Sphinx](http://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/) * [Pandoc](https://pandoc.org/) * [markdown-toc.el](https://github.com/ardumont/markdown-toc) (what I used) * various plugins for [vim](https://github.com/mzlogin/vim-markdown-toc) and other editors I used this TOC extension at a previous job, and my observation is that it's fine if people just edit the TOC manually. It's just text and it's not a huge deal if it gets a little out of sync. It can also be regenerated at any time by anyone with any of these tools. Tree-SHA512: 298d1605ea5e8bfc0f75e70570c23ebd6891e4ffcdedd24fefadc23edd6e4b96509d8d102209868468a1b3ddbe2c3b8462698cdda8b9421348b5bc6f7b8d0cb8
Bitcoin Core
Setup
Bitcoin Core is the original Bitcoin client and it builds the backbone of the network. It downloads and, by default, stores the entire history of Bitcoin transactions (which is currently more than 100 GBs); depending on the speed of your computer and network connection, the synchronization process can take anywhere from a few hours to a day or more.
To download Bitcoin Core, visit bitcoincore.org.
Running
The following are some helpful notes on how to run Bitcoin on your native platform.
Unix
Unpack the files into a directory and run:
bin/bitcoin-qt(GUI) orbin/bitcoind(headless)
Windows
Unpack the files into a directory, and then run bitcoin-qt.exe.
OS X
Drag Bitcoin-Core to your applications folder, and then run Bitcoin-Core.
Need Help?
- See the documentation at the Bitcoin Wiki for help and more information.
- Ask for help on #bitcoin on Freenode. If you don't have an IRC client use webchat here.
- Ask for help on the BitcoinTalk forums, in the Technical Support board.
Building
The following are developer notes on how to build Bitcoin on your native platform. They are not complete guides, but include notes on the necessary libraries, compile flags, etc.
- Dependencies
- OS X Build Notes
- Unix Build Notes
- Windows Build Notes
- OpenBSD Build Notes
- NetBSD Build Notes
- Gitian Building Guide
Development
The Bitcoin repo's root README contains relevant information on the development process and automated testing.
- Developer Notes
- Release Notes
- Release Process
- Source Code Documentation (External Link)
- Translation Process
- Translation Strings Policy
- Travis CI
- Unauthenticated REST Interface
- Shared Libraries
- BIPS
- Dnsseed Policy
- Benchmarking
Resources
- Discuss on the BitcoinTalk forums, in the Development & Technical Discussion board.
- Discuss project-specific development on #bitcoin-core-dev on Freenode. If you don't have an IRC client use webchat here.
- Discuss general Bitcoin development on #bitcoin-dev on Freenode. If you don't have an IRC client use webchat here.
Miscellaneous
- Assets Attribution
- Files
- Fuzz-testing
- Reduce Traffic
- Tor Support
- Init Scripts (systemd/upstart/openrc)
- ZMQ
License
Distributed under the MIT software license. This product includes software developed by the OpenSSL Project for use in the OpenSSL Toolkit. This product includes cryptographic software written by Eric Young (eay@cryptsoft.com), and UPnP software written by Thomas Bernard.