A Minty Day, everyone!
Spring is in the air in temperate parts of the northern hemisphere. Just like all of plants trying to push their green buds out, the MintCoin developers are also trying to push something out - in our case a release of a fresh, green MintCoin wallet.
All of the code changes since our last update have been related to getting the wallet to build on various platforms.
Since the last update we managed to get the Windows cross-compile working... kind-of. We have a working 32-bit version of the daemon and the Qt GUI version. The 64-bit version is not working for reasons unknown; whether we need this before the release or not is not yet decided.
Enlil and I also managed to get the macOS version of the wallet built, for both the daemon and the Qt GUI version. This required a bit of infrastructure magic on Enlil's part to get a machine that we can actually use to build and test it, and I am very happy with the results.
As mentioned in the 2018-03-12 Mint Development Update, we are using Travis CI to make sure that changes to the code compile properly.
Now that we have the macOS build working, I have extended the Travis CI builds to also check macOS as well as the Ubuntu Linux system that we started with. In the near future we should be able to also use this system for making sure that our Windows builds work too, and possibly even our ARM version.
Since Travis CI is doing all the work of building the systems, we will try to use it to actually produce the executable code that we will ship in future releases. Having such a system in place can mean that we should be able to make these future releases much more quickly and reliably - that's what CI (continuous integration) is about, after all.
The official GitHub repository remains:
https://github.com/MintcoinCommunity/Mintcoin-Desktop-Wallet
We added three new issues:
-
Qt wallet is unresponsive when syncing
On my development virtual machine, I notice that the user interface is basically broken when syncing the wallet. It takes ages to respond. I do not see this behavior on my laptop. Anyway, I added this issue as it should be investigated further. -
Find and remove unused methods
While getting the macOS build to work, we had to remove a broken method, which was unused. It occurs to me that there may be a lot of such methods, and we should delete them. This is a good ticket for someone who wants a kind of cleanup/janitorial ticket. -
mintcoind error kernel.cpp:422
A user has reported a bug! This is good because it may let us fix it. However, in this case we need more details. If you've seen a similar issue please feel free to add more data. Also,hoyanf, if you're out there, please get back to us.
Our previous goals were always builds. Those are for the most part working! So now our immediate goal is:
- Release a new MintCoin wallet
The current release is over 2 years old, so this is not a small thing. We have a plan of sorts that we are updating as we figure out the details. If you want to have a look you can check it out here:
https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/MintCoin-2.1-release-planning
WARNING: This Etherpad is very much a work in progress, meant as a tool for people making the release. However, if you have suggestions or want to help then as always we really appreciate it.
Eagle-eyed readers of that document may notice that we're going to be PGP signing this and future releases. If you use PGP and are willing to sign the MintCoin release key, please contact me.
Our list of things that would be nice remains:
- Speeding up the initial sync
- Packages for popular distributions (like Debian and Fedora packages)
We will be including a snapshot of the blockchain in an optional version of the release, which should help with the initial sync.
And our list of things that should be done someday also remains:
- Wallet code automated testing
- Reducing the memory footprint
As always, please contact us if you want to help, or just fork the code on GitHub and start hacking.
Until next time, as always, I am...
Mintily Yours,
Shane Kerr
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
