1Bitcoin Core integration/staging tree
2=====================================
3
4https://bitcoincore.org
5
6For an immediately usable, binary version of the Bitcoin Core software, see
7https://bitcoincore.org/en/download/.
8
9What is Bitcoin Core?
10---------------------
11
12Bitcoin Core connects to the Bitcoin peer-to-peer network to download and fully
13validate blocks and transactions. It also includes a wallet and graphical user
14interface, which can be optionally built.
15
16Further information about Bitcoin Core is available in the [doc folder](/doc).
17
18License
19-------
20
21Bitcoin Core is released under the terms of the MIT license. See [COPYING](COPYING) for more
22information or see https://opensource.org/license/MIT.
23
24Development Process
25-------------------
26
27The `master` branch is regularly built (see `doc/build-*.md` for instructions) and tested, but it is not guaranteed to be
28completely stable. [Tags](https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/tags) are created
29regularly from release branches to indicate new official, stable release versions of Bitcoin Core.
30
31The https://github.com/bitcoin-core/gui repository is used exclusively for the
32development of the GUI. Its master branch is identical in all monotree
33repositories. Release branches and tags do not exist, so please do not fork
34that repository unless it is for development reasons.
35
36The contribution workflow is described in [CONTRIBUTING.md](CONTRIBUTING.md)
37and useful hints for developers can be found in [doc/developer-notes.md](doc/developer-notes.md).
38
39Testing
40-------
41
42Testing and code review is the bottleneck for development; we get more pull
43requests than we can review and test on short notice. Please be patient and help out by testing
44other people's pull requests, and remember this is a security-critical project where any mistake might cost people
45lots of money.
46
47### Automated Testing
48
49Developers are strongly encouraged to write [unit tests](src/test/README.md) for new code, and to
50submit new unit tests for old code. Unit tests can be compiled and run
51(assuming they weren't disabled during the generation of the build system) with: `ctest`. Further details on running
52and extending unit tests can be found in [/src/test/README.md](/src/test/README.md).
53
54There are also [regression and integration tests](/test), written
55in Python.
56These tests can be run (if the [test dependencies](/test) are installed) with: `build/test/functional/test_runner.py`
57(assuming `build` is your build directory).
58
59The CI (Continuous Integration) systems make sure that every pull request is tested on Windows, Linux, and macOS.
60The CI must pass on all commits before merge to avoid unrelated CI failures on new pull requests.
61
62### Manual Quality Assurance (QA) Testing
63
64Changes should be tested by somebody other than the developer who wrote the
65code. This is especially important for large or high-risk changes. It is useful
66to add a test plan to the pull request description if testing the changes is
67not straightforward.
68
69Translations
70------------
71
72Changes to translations as well as new translations can be submitted to
73[Bitcoin Core's Transifex page](https://explore.transifex.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/).
74
75Translations are periodically pulled from Transifex and merged into the git repository. See the
76[translation process](doc/translation_process.md) for details on how this works.
77
78**Important**: We do not accept translation changes as GitHub pull requests because the next
79pull from Transifex would automatically overwrite them again.
80