491d827d52
Use to replace m_active_chainstate, m_ibd_chainstate, and m_snapshot_chainstate
members. This has several benefits:
- Ensures ChainstateManager treats chainstates instances equally, making
distinctions based on their attributes, not having special cases and making
assumptions based on their identities.
- Normalizes ChainstateManager representation so states that should be
impossible to reach and validation code has no handling for (like
m_snapshot_chainstate being set and m_ibd_chainstate being unset, or both
being set but m_active_chainstate pointing to the m_ibd_chainstate) can no
longer be represented.
- Makes ChainstateManager more extensible so new chainstates can be added for
different purposes, like indexing or generating and validating assumeutxo
snapshots without interrupting regular node operations. With the
m_chainstates member, new chainstates can be added and handled without needing
to make changes all over validation code or to copy/paste/modify the existing
code that's been already been written to handle m_ibd_chainstate and
m_snapshot_chainstate.
- Avoids terms that are confusing and misleading:
- The term "active chainstate" term is confusing because multiple chainstates
will be active and in use at the same time. Before a snapshot is validated,
wallet code will use the snapshot chainstate, while indexes will use the IBD
chainstate, and netorking code will use both chainstates, downloading
snapshot blocks at higher priority, but also IBD blocks simultaneously.
- The term "snapshot chainstate" is ambiguous because it could refer either
to the chainstate originally loaded from a snapshot, or to the chainstate
being used to validate a snapshot that was loaded, or to a chainstate being
used to produce a snapshot, but it is arbitrary used to refer the first
thing. The terms "most-work chainstate" or "assumed-valid chainstate" should
be less ambiguous ways to refer to chainstates loaded from snapshots.
- The term "IBD chainstate" is not just ambiguous but actively confusing
because technically IBD ends and the node is considered synced when the
snapshot chainstate finishes syncing, so in practice the IBD chainstate
will mostly by synced after IBD is complete. The term "fully-validated" is
a better way of describing the characteristics and purpose of this
chainstate.
Bitcoin Core integration/staging tree
For an immediately usable, binary version of the Bitcoin Core software, see https://bitcoincore.org/en/download/.
What is Bitcoin Core?
Bitcoin Core connects to the Bitcoin peer-to-peer network to download and fully validate blocks and transactions. It also includes a wallet and graphical user interface, which can be optionally built.
Further information about Bitcoin Core is available in the doc folder.
License
Bitcoin Core is released under the terms of the MIT license. See COPYING for more information or see https://opensource.org/license/MIT.
Development Process
The master branch is regularly built (see doc/build-*.md for instructions) and tested, but it is not guaranteed to be
completely stable. Tags are created
regularly from release branches to indicate new official, stable release versions of Bitcoin Core.
The https://github.com/bitcoin-core/gui repository is used exclusively for the development of the GUI. Its master branch is identical in all monotree repositories. Release branches and tags do not exist, so please do not fork that repository unless it is for development reasons.
The contribution workflow is described in CONTRIBUTING.md and useful hints for developers can be found in doc/developer-notes.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 during the generation of the build system) with: ctest. 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.
These tests can be run (if the test dependencies are installed) with: build/test/functional/test_runner.py
(assuming build is your build directory).
The CI (Continuous Integration) systems make sure that every pull request is tested on Windows, Linux, and macOS. The CI must pass on all commits before merge to avoid unrelated CI failures on new pull requests.
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.