Primecoin integration/staging tree

What is Primecoin?

Primecoin is an experimental cryptocurrency that introduces the first scientific computing proof-of-work to cryptocurrency technology. Primecoin's proof-of-work is an innovative design based on searching for prime number chains, providing potential scientific value in addition to minting and security for the network. Similar to Bitcoin, Primecoin enables instant payments to anyone, anywhere in the world. It also uses peer-to-peer technology to operate with no central authority: managing transactions and issuing money are carried out collectively by the network. Primecoin is also the name of the open source software which enables the use of this currency.

For more information, as well as an immediately useable, binary version of the Primecoin client sofware, see http://primecoin.org.

License

Primecoin is released under conditional MIT license. See COPYING` for more information.

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 Bitcoin development team members simply pulls it.

If it is a more complicated or potentially controversial change, then the patch submitter will be asked to start a discussion (if they haven't already) on the ppcoin/primecoin forum (http://ppcointalk.org).

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 Primecoin.

Testing

Testing and code review is the bottleneck for development; we get more pull requests than we can review and test. Please be patient and help out, 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 for the core code are in src/test/. To compile and run them:

cd src; make -f makefile.unix test

Unit tests for the GUI code are in src/qt/test/. To compile and run them:

qmake BITCOIN_QT_TEST=1 -o Makefile.test bitcoin-qt.pro
make -f Makefile.test
./bitcoin-qt_test

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/bitcoin/QA/ for how to create a test plan.

zouf / primecoin