Linkcoin integration/staging tree

http://www.linkcoin.org

Copyright (c) 2009-2014 Bitcoin Developers Copyright (c) 2011-2014 Linkcoin Developers

What is Linkcoin?

Linkcoin is a LiteCoin Clone, a lite version of Bitcoin using scrypt as a proof-of-work algorithm.

• 4 minute block targets
• subsidy halves in 400k blocks (~4 years)
• ~84 million total coins

The rest is the same as Bitcoin.

• 80 coins per block
• retarget difficulty every block

For more information, as well as an immediately useable, binary version of the Linkcoin client sofware, see http://www.linkcoin.org.

Building

Compiler Machine

Recommended Environment: Debian 7 (Wheezy) This environment is required for binary compatibility with older systems and to ensure the depends system works as expected with the provided Qt 4.8.7 patches.

Static Build with Depends System (Recommended)

Linkcoin uses the Bitcoin depends system to build fully static binaries with no external dependencies. This is the only supported way to build the release binaries.

Features:

• ✅ Fully static binaries (portable, no dependencies)
• ✅ Cross-platform (Linux, Windows)
• ✅ Reproducible builds
• ✅ Qt 4.8.7 (compatible with old MinGW 4.6+)

1. Build Dependencies

First, build the dependencies for your target platform. This step only needs to be done once or when dependencies change.

For Linux (x86_64):

cd depends
make HOST=x86_64-pc-linux-gnu -j$(nproc)
cd ..

For Windows (x86_64):

cd depends
make HOST=x86_64-w64-mingw32 -j$(nproc)
cd ..

2. Build Linkcoin

Use the provided build.sh script to compile the daemon and GUI.

Linux:

./build.sh --linux

Result: src/linkcoind and linkcoin-qt

Windows:

./build.sh --windows

Result: src/linkcoind.exe and release/linkcoin-qt.exe

Build Options:

• --daemon-only: Build only linkcoind (skip Qt GUI)
• --help: Show all available options

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Manual Build (Legacy/Development)

For development purposes, you can still use the legacy makefiles, but this is not recommended for release builds.

Linux Daemon:

cd src
make -f makefile.unix

Linux GUI:

qmake
make

For development with system libraries:

# Build daemon
cd src
make -f makefile.unix

# Build GUI
qmake
make

Note: Produces dynamically-linked binaries requiring system libraries.

License

Linkcoin is released under the terms of the MIT license. See COPYING for more information or see http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT.

Development process

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 Linkcoin 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 with the devs and community.

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.txt) 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 Linkcoin.

Testing

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.

Automated Testing

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 BITCOIN_QT_TEST=1 -o Makefile.test bitcoin-qt.pro
make -f Makefile.test
./linkcoin-qt_test