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 integration/staging tree
What is Bitcoin?
Bitcoin is an experimental 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 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 Bitcoin Core software, see https://bitcoin.org/en/download, or read the original whitepaper.
License
Bitcoin Core is released under the terms of the MIT license. See COPYING for more information or see https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT.
Development Process
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 Bitcoin Core.
The contribution workflow is described in CONTRIBUTING.md.
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. Further details on running
and extending unit tests can be found in /src/test/README.md.
There are also regression and integration tests, written
in Python, that are run automatically on the build server.
These tests can be run (if the test dependencies are installed) with: test/functional/test_runner.py
The Travis CI system makes sure that every pull request is built for Windows, Linux, and OS X, and that unit/sanity tests are run automatically.
Manual Quality Assurance (QA) Testing
Changes should be tested by somebody other than the developer who wrote the code. This is especially important for large or high-risk changes. It is useful to add a test plan to the pull request description if testing the changes is not straightforward.
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.