It has been a busy month; here's what I'm thinking about: • It's great to get 0.5 out; congratulations to Wladimir for doing a great job with the new GUI.
• The wallet encryption bug was embarrassing and stressful, and chewed up a lot of my time over the past couple of weeks. Bugs happen, but I've been spending time thinking about what I can do differently to make it less likely major bugs slip into releases. Finding the money to hire some professional QA people to help create test plans and then execute them (the test plans, not the QA people) is one possible answer. If you have experience finding funding for open source projects (or know somebody who does) I'd like to talk with you-- I would much rather spend my time writing code and thinking about technical issues instead of trying to figure out if advertising or sponsorship or a Donate menu entry in the client is a reasonable way to get more testing resources for the project. Last month I mentioned I was thinking about Organization; there is a non-profit organization forming to handle Bitcoin PR and marketing, which takes care of one big area of work. • The BIP (Bitcoin Improvement Proposal) process seems to be working well, with good proposals and good discussions (both here and on the Forums): https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bitcoin_Improvement_Proposals Things I think are high priority but am not planning on working on: • Implement BIP 14 (separate the protocol and client versions) • Rework/rethink wallet handling: I think we could do a much better job with both encryption and backups. • Work on higher-level multi-signature/multi-device transaction approval; I really want a version of bitcoin-qt that requires me to poke an "OK" button on my iPhone before it can send coins. • Code clean-up; I'd like to see more small code refactors that moves non-performance-critical code from .h files to .cpp files, makes classes more self-contained, etc. "Rename the world" or "change every single file" pull requests are hard to deal with because there is never a good time to pull them, but a steady stream of "makes the code a little bit easier to work with" would be a Good Thing. Especially if you submit unit tests for whatever you touch... Thinks I think are high priority and AM planning on working on; if any of them inspire you, feel free to steal them from me, I still have too many things on my TODO list: • Create a pull request for OP_EVAL/multisignature transactions • Back-port OP_EVAL/multisig to 0.3/0.4 and release patches to make it easy for the big mining pools to support it, so the network is ready for multisig/multi-device transactions. • Work on the 'headers-only' branch, so users have a better first-time experience. • I want to start doing some internal re-architecting, and I think porting my old monitor transactions/blocks patch to use Boost.Signals might be a good place to start. The internal pieces are pretty obvious (GUI, database, network, wallet, transaction validation, and block-chain handling) and I think starting to rearchitect to use Boost.Signals for internal communications would be a big step towards more re-usable code. • Get back to the cross-platform testing infrastructure tool, and lots of good and bad blockchains that can be used for cross-platform testing. I'm probably forgetting several things, but I think that's enough for now. If you're going to the conference in Prague, have fun! Please figure out all the hard questions while you're there, and report back.... ------------------- Previous Brain Dump: https://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=28223657 -- -- Gavin Andresen ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ All the data continuously generated in your IT infrastructure contains a definitive record of customers, application performance, security threats, fraudulent activity, and more. Splunk takes this data and makes sense of it. IT sense. And common sense. http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-novd2d _______________________________________________ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development