MFCoin Core integration/staging tree
What is MFCoin?
MFCoin is an experimental digital currency that enables instant payments to anyone, anywhere in the world and enables of storing information as key/value pairs in blockchain. MFCoin uses peer-to-peer technology to operate with no central authority: managing transactions and issuing money are carried out collectively by the network. For minting MFCoin uses Proof-of-Stake, Proof-of-Work and Auxiliary-Proof-of-Work mechanisms. MFCoin 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 MFCoin Core software, see here.
License
MFCoin Core is released under the terms of the GPL3 license. See COPYING for more information or the GNU site.
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 MFCoin development team members simply pulls it.
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 MFCoin.
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
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.
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 mfcoins" 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
MFCoin 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.