dev

Development

Make sure to read our Home#Background and Home#Design Goals.

Contents

Code Management
Releases
Commit messages
Continuous Integration
Misc Notes

Code Management

We achieve our design goals primarily through this codebase as a reference implementation. This repository is a fork of bitcoin core and our implementation is a set of git commits on top of upstream Bitcoin releases. This implements the Zerocash protocol and a few other distinct features.

Zkbot

We use a homu instance called zkbot to merge all PRs. (Direct pushing to the "latest" branch of the repo is not allowed.) Here's just a quick overview of how it works.

If you're on our team, you can do @zkbot <command> to tell zkbot to do things. Here are a few examples:

r+ [commithash] this will test the merge and then actually commit the merge into the repo if the tests succeed.
try this will test the merge and nothing else.
rollup this is like r+ but for insignificant changes. Use this when we want to test a bunch of merges at once to save buildbot time.

More instructions are found here: http://ci.leastauthority.com:12477/

Tags and Branches

Our git branches and tags always follow this schema:

zc.<UPSTREAM TAG>.<ZC DETAIL>

Some example branches are:

zc.v0.11.1.latest
zc.v0.10.0.ticket197.python3-compat.0

The parts of this schema are as follows:

zc.

Our git branches and tags always begin with the prefix zc.. The goal is to disambiguate our branches/tags from upstream within the same repository. (This is predicated on upstream not using that prefix.)

<UPSTREAM TAG>

All of our changes are commits on top of an upstream core release tag. This field is the literal tag.

<ZC DETAIL>

latest is the most recent "development" branch based on the given upstream release. As we transition to newer upstream releases, older zc.<OLD UPSTREAM TAG>.latest branches will become dormant and contain a subset of our newer development changes.

Renaming Conventions

Our development branches have the form zc.<UPSTREAM TAG>.latest, and when they are rebased, the new branch has a new name, since the <UPSTREAM TAG> field has changed. For example zc.v0.10.0.latest may be rebased to a new upstream release and the new branch zc.v0.11.2.latest.

Workflow

Fork our repository
Create a new branch with your changes
Submit a pull request

Releases

Zcash release tags will take the following form:

zc.<UPSTREAM TAG>.z<N>

The parts are:

<UPSTREAM TAG>: Described above.
<N>: The Zcash revision. This number resets to zero every time <UPSTREAM TAG> changes, and increments with each new Zcash release upon the same <UPSTREAM TAG>.

Commit messages

Commit messages should contain enough information in the first line to be able to scan a list of patches and identify which one is being searched for. Do not use "auto-close" keywords -- tickets should be closed manually. The auto-close keywords are "close[ds]", "resolve[ds]", and "fix(e[ds])?".