Happy 4/20 everyone! Regardless of whether appreciate the leaves celebrated on this day, I'm glad that you're interested in the leafy green goodness of MintCoin.
Like people celebrating 4/20, the crypto markets were also a bit higher this week, with the first sustained recovery in quite a while. The price of MintCoin itself seems pretty stable, but who knows what the future brings?
The focus remains on getting a new release out. But as usual, I was unable to resist making a few small changes to the wallet.
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Change to date format in logs
The MintCoin logs used a timestamp format which used the localized format for the date, but a 24-hour value for time. One problem with this is that it is impossible to know if 2/7/18 is February 7 or July 2, since the USA uses a broken date format, and without context it is impossible to know whether the first number is the month or day of the month. The simple solution for this is to use the ISO 8601 date format, which isYYYY-mm-dd. We also took the opportunity to explicitly display the time zone of the logs - which are always in UTC; this was also not clear from the previous format. -
Minor cleanup of translation files
The translation files had a broken tag in them. This did not serve any purpose, but did cause warning messages when building the wallet. The broken tag has been removed from both of the supported languages (Russian and English).
Rebelway518 on the MintCoin Telegram group decided to see if it is possible to get MintCoin running on a Raspberry Pi. We have tried this in the past, but always been stymied by the lack of memory; MintCoin currently takes almost 2 Gbyte of RAM, and the humble Raspberry Pi only has 1 Gbyte.
However, there is some chance that using a compressed RAM swap space we can perhaps expand the available memory that MintCoin has available to it. One way to do this on Raspbian is with zram. Experiments are ongoing!
Some users are reporting various scary Windows error messages that are preventing them from running the MintCoin wallet. We have some theories about why this is happening - such as the memory size of MintCoin growing to be too big for the 32-bit Windows wallet, or perhaps some change pushed out by Microsoft recently - but we do not really know. Maybe the new, 64-bit Windows wallet will help the situation? Maybe Microsoft will push a fix for some broken underlying system?
We still have a release plan for the next release, which we are imaginatively calling "2.1-beta1" for now. The Etherpad with the plan is here:
https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/MintCoin-2.1-release-planning
At one point in the past week, some intrepid person translated about half of the release plan to Chinese. You can see that here:
https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/MintCoin-2.1-release-planning/timeslider#1608
While we don't mind anyone using the release plan for whatever they want - including translating it to other languages - please don't modify the release plan without chatting to people involved in the release! You can copy the release plan anywhere you want of course. I chose a tool that is easy to use instead of requiring accounts or approvals or something like that. It would be great if we could continue to use it.
As far as actual work since the last update, we have added build support in Travis CI for Windows, both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of both the command-line daemon and the Qt GUI wallet. Now we are building for:
- Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr)
- OS X 10.11 (El Capitan)
- macOS 10.12 (Sierra)
- macOS 10.13 (High Sierra)
- Windows
You can always look at the current state of the Travis CI for MintCoin here:
https://travis-ci.org/MintcoinCommunity/Mintcoin-Desktop-Wallet
I thought that this would be the last platform that we need, but someone requested that we support 32-bit Linux. Once that is added our set of targets will be complete.
That means that we still have two major things left to do before the beta:
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Add 32-bit Linux support to the Travis CI builds
This should be possible with something called multiarch; a system where Linux can include libraries for more than one CPU family at a time. Using multiarch we should be able to build for both i686 (32-bit) and x86_64 (64-bit) CPU on Travis CI. (Note that we might also be able to build for ARM CPU in this way too, but since the Raspberry Pi does not currently seem to be a valid system to run MintCoin on, I do not want to hold up the release for this.) -
Export the results of the Travis CI build
This means taking the compiled programs and sending them somewhere useful. It looks like this is straightforward, but the work has to be done.
The official GitHub repository remains:
https://github.com/MintcoinCommunity/Mintcoin-Desktop-Wallet
No issues were closed in the official repository.
One issue was added:
- Research MXE compile warning about IPC
There is a compiler warning when we cross-compile our Windows wallet. It is probably not super important, but we should investigate to be sure.
While the main focus is on the next release, there are also other goals, such as:
- Figuring out the problem some Windows users are having
- Speeding up the initial sync
- Packages for popular distributions (like Debian and Fedora packages)
- Wallet code automated testing
- Reducing the memory footprint
I think we are all itching for even more exciting changes in MintCoin. This should all be possible once we get our house in order with some fixes to the old wallet.
As always, please contact us if you want to help, or just fork the code on GitHub and start hacking.
Until next time, I am...
Feeling a Minty Fresh this Friday,
Shane Kerr
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
