PyCoin is an experimental POW/POS based currency that enables instant payments to anyone, anywhere in the world. PyCoin uses peer-to-peer technology to operate with no central authority: managing transactions and issuing money are carried out collectively by the network. PyCoin 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 PyCoin Core software, see https://py-coin.com/en/download, or read the original whitepaper.
PyCoin Core is released under the terms of the MIT license. See COPYING for more information or see https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT.
Developers work in their own trees, then submit pull requests when they think their feature or bug fix is ready.
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 they don't match the project's coding conventions (see coding.txt) or are controversial.
The master branch is regularly built and tested, but is not guaranteed to be completely stable. Tags are regularly created to indicate new stable release versions of PyCoin.
Feature branches are created when there are major new features being worked on by several people.
From time to time a pull request will become outdated. If this occurs, and the pull is no longer automatically mergeable; a comment on the pull will be used to issue a warning of closure. The pull will be closed 15 days after the warning if action is not taken by the author. Pull requests closed in this manner will have their corresponding issue labeled 'stagnant'.
Issues with no commits will be given a similar warning, and closed after 15 days from their last activity. Issues closed in this manner will be labeled 'stale'.
The contribution workflow is described in CONTRIBUTING.md.
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.
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
and extending unit tests can be found in /src/test/README.md.
There are also regression and integration tests, written
in Python, that are run automatically on the build server.
These tests can be run (if the test dependencies are installed) with: test/functional/test_runner.py
The Travis CI system makes sure that every pull request is built for Windows, Linux, and OS X, and that unit/sanity tests are run automatically.
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.
Changes to translations as well as new translations can be submitted to PyCoin 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.
Translators should also subscribe to the mailing list.