Copyright (c) 2013-2017 Datacoin Developers Copyright (c) 2013 Primecoin Developers Copyright (c) 2009-2013 Bitcoin Developers Copyright (c) 2011-2013 PPCoin Developers
Datacoin is an experimental cryptocurrency that introduces the first scientific computing proof-of-work to cryptocurrency technology. Datacoin'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, Datacoin 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. Datacoin 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 Datacoin client sofware, see http://datacoininfo.org.
Datacoin is released under conditional MIT license. See COPYING` for more information.
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 Datacoin 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 datacoin announcement thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=325735.new).
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
Datacoin.
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.
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 DATACOIN_QT_TEST=1 -o Makefile.test datacoin-qt.pro
make -f Makefile.test
./datacoin-qt_test
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.