Topic: [Round #5] Final Testing Release Before Armory v0.88 (Read 6430 times)

I created "armoryd" which is included, but it's extremely minimal.  I was waiting for some of the stability issues to go away before expanding it any more.  But it will run for multiple days at a time before crashing, so it may still be useful for some low-importance activities   (the crashing is an artifact of the way it tracks the blk*.dat files, which is going away with the upcoming update).

btw. is it possible to get some data from armory via RPC/API?

I would like to check balances of my paper wallets without blockchain.info via such an API.

the link doesn't work for me 

Hey, I think you should fix that!. Where I placed the red circle/ellipse thingy, I think the text should be fully centered (to allow seeing the decimals without wasting the space) instead of starting on the middle like it is currently. What do you think?

That check happens in the main thread, which means it blocks until it's done.  That means the GUI will be unresponsive for up to 0.01s on each call.  If this function was called every 0.1 seconds, the interface would be jittery and laggy.  It's not called that often, but in the future I might want to... 

So, I want the value as low as possible unless I want to go through the hassle of somehow multithreading it.  Since it's localhost, I figured 0.001s was more than enough time anyway.  And I was right... for all systems except Windows Server 2008, apparently...

Oh well.  I reverted it back to 0.01s, which isn't a problem when it's called at most once-per-second, and I'm sure it will have minimal impact.  I just have to be careful if I want to increase that frequency. 

Thanks for fixing the problem. However, why would you want to reduce the timeout from 0.01s to 0.001s? Would there be any noticeable difference?

A minor buglet:

The time estimate when loading the block chain is completely off.  It takes 2-3 min to load, most of the time it estimates the remaining time to 18 min.  This is undoubtedly because it only uses the number of block files read to make the estimate, but since I upgraded the Satoshi client from 0.7 to 0.8 I have three huge files, and around 15 small ones after that one.

Ack, I forgot to mention (and it will be at the top of the release notes):

Windows users must uninstall the previous version before installing this new one.  If you've already installed the new version, reinstall/repair it.

Gah, I forgot about you.  There should be more information in there this time.  I added a bunch of good debugging output. 

Can you remind me what is wrong?  And send me the log file again, just in case it did catch something new.  Thanks for being so patient.  I'll figure it out!

The latest release is still not working for me, and the log file is pretty much the same. What can I do?

I'm fairly certain it's a unicode issue.  The installation path or datadir have a unicode character in them, and it's breaking the settings.  This is one reason I'm anxious to do the new wallets and just clear this up once and for all.  Do you still see a unicode error in the log file?

EDIT: Now after I installed the version of bitcoind from the official Ubuntu repository Armory can see it, but I still can not open the settings window, so I guess it's an independent problem.

Yeah, Armory has no unicode support yet.  It would've been trivial if I had known from the beginning what "unicode" is and how to support it... but I didn't.  I haven't been able to upgrade it, because I didn't want to risk breaking the wallet code (fixed-width fields overflow with unicode characters).

However, I'm totally revamping wallets in the near future, so I will go through and upgrade all of Armory with it.  It shouldn't be too hard, I just don't want to risk coin-losing bugs by upgrading the old wallets in a hurry, and they're going to be obsolete soon, anyway.

For now, let's see if I can get around this for you.  Is it failing because of a custom bitcoind installation path?  Or does it fail anyway?  In the ArmorySettings.txt file, do you see fields with non-ASCII characters?  I can probably work around a specific instance of unicode problems, I just can't upgrade the whole app, yet.

Okay Alan, I compiled 0.87.94-beta, after startup it prompted me that the bitcoind installation cannot be found, I tried to point it to the location of the installation, by clicking the "Change Settings" button in the dashboard, or the "Settings" item in the menu, both gave no response, no window popped up, instead, the console showed the following error message whenever I tried:


So it seem like a encoding support problem(FYI u+5e74 is the unicode representation for the Chinese character meaning year), I don't know how difficult it's to sort this out, if you can't please just tell me what configurations I should change on my part to make it work.

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "ArmoryQt.py", line 716, in openSettings
    dlgSettings = DlgSettings(self, self)
  File "/home/****/BitcoinArmory/BitcoinArmory/qtdialogs.py", line 9913, in __init__
    'specified format.' % exampleStr )
  File "/home/****/BitcoinArmory/BitcoinArmory/qtdefines.py", line 203, in __init__
    self.setText(txt, **kwargs)
  File "/home/****/BitcoinArmory/BitcoinArmory/qtdefines.py", line 206, in setText
    text = str(text)
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u5e74' in position 232: ordinal not in range(128)

No command line qrguments for bitcoinqt. bitcoin.conf is

That 0 is returned when it can't communicate with Bitcoin-Qt/bitcoind (it normally returns the port number on which it was found, though by default it only searches one port).  Is it possible that you are using different command line arguments for it?  Bitcoin.conf file?

I'm really at a loss for this one...

Strange question:  is your clock UTC or local?  I ran into an infinite-initializing problem when my clock was set wrong.  Now that I bring it up myself, I guess I should actually make it clock-independent.

I've conceded that some OS will just have to do manual mode (OSX, probably XP).  But I'm not sure why that broke for you.  Can you check the log after trying it in manual mode?

The automatic mode calls bitcoind successfully, but stopped at inititalizing bitcoin engine. Nothing interesting in log.

That's happened before when there's been some kind of messup in the install directory.  Can you completely uninstall it and remove the C:\Program Files (x86)\Armory directory.  Then reinstall.  It should go away. 

I never quite figured out what conditions cause that...

It's even worse

Error: "The specified module could not be found. LoadLibrary(pythondll) failed"

Error: "C:\Program Files (x86)\Armory\Armory Bitcoin Client\PYTHON27.DLL

It doesn't work for me. I'm running Windows Server 2008 R2 64bit. bitcoind is launched automatically, blockchain is synchanized, but armory keeps saying "initializing bitcoin engine". I change it to the traditional mode but it keeps saying offline while bitcoin-qt is running. I have moved back to 0.87.2 and everything work as usual

This is one of the two major upgrades I need in order for Armory to be usable to users with shorter attention spans.  When this is working properly, you will never need to run Bitcoin-Qt/bitcoind again.  Just start Armory and it will do the rest.  

The other major upgrade is the resource usage and load time.  Those are both getting knocked out with the blockchain management/DB stuff.  That is top priority after this (including not rescanning every time).

I finally have a testing version in Windows (64-bit only).  This really is a remarkable P.I.T.A. ... and this is still quite a bit rough around the edges, but it's at least demo-ready.  A lot of time was spent making the download-and-run window for when you click "Install for me!".  Especially if you are running an old version of Bitcoin-Qt (not 0.8.1), please uninstall it and then run Armory and let it install it for you.  And don't worry, there is cryptographic verification of the installer before it runs it!  (see the top of versions.txt)

Linux users can still help test, but you have to use the "managesatoshi" branch and compile it yourself.

---

What I've done:

If you are running Bitcoin-Qt when you start Armory, it will now tell you to stop.  "Let Armory manage the Bitcoin software" is the default.  You will be told to either close Bitcoin-Qt, or change your settings (with a convenient button in the middle of the dashboard).   You can go into your settings and uncheck the box to carry on using Armory exactly as you used to.  Or you can leave it checked and just close Bitcoin-Qt/bitcoind.

If you do not have bitcoind installed or it is in a non-standard location, it will tell you to install it, or change your settings to point to where it is located.  I just spent a fair amount of time not only producing instructions for installing in Linux, but a "Do it for me!" button for the PPA.  It's experimental, but so far it has worked for me in two environments.  Please try this feature!  I want to find out if it is actually reliable (I actually don't know why it wouldn't be; it simply executes the 3 commands using gksudo, but I suppose it could choke if your package manager is broken, in which case I have no clue what happens).  (EDIT: yes I know gksudo is a gnome thing ... but if you are not using gnome, i.e. default Ubuntu, then you probably can handle setting up the PPA yourself or manually installing it).

I need help testing, especially from the Linux folks, because they're the ones most likely to have non-standard configurations that will break this.  I also need testing in non-Ubuntu environments.  I've done a lot of testing, but somehow I'm confident it won't be enough.  And I know there's still some things missing (like the count-down timer on the initial blockchain sync).   Also, bear in mind this version has a lot of debugging output left on, to help me figure out the code flow.  I'm sorry if it's annoying (it sometimes annoys me, too).

---

To use 0.87.8 (which will be 0.88 when it's released):

Linux:
-- Pull and switch branches: "git checkout managesatoshi"
-- Must install python-psutil package.  This is a new dependency to help with managing the background process.  It will be added to the next offline bundle.
-- Recompile

Windows:
-- http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1139081/ArmoryTestingReleases/armory_0.87.8-testing_win64.msi

Please mention everything that doesn't look right.  Most likely, configurations/combinations of options that lead to a dashboard that doesn't say the right thing, or buttons missing that should be there, etc.  Try out the new settings (renamed from "preferences").   One thing I threw on top was added a permanent "--skip-online-check" to the settings.  Try that out, too.

Crap, I guess I need to catch that condition!  At least I have access to that output so I can interpret the error message.

Also, having the bitcoind.exe in that directory is not normal.  It should be in the daemon directory.  I wonder if that's an ancient version of bitcoind.exe...?

The log file shows this:


Does that file exist for you?

Nope, the bitcoind path is correct. It's not working even after explicitly setting it in the config. I'll keep on trying

Gah!  I see the error, and not sure why it happened.  It looks like it's trying to run a non-existent bitcoind.exe.  Can you point it to the correct location in the settings file?  
C:\Program Files (x86)\Bitcoin\daemon\
Run it in offline mode to be able to open and change the settings.  Then continue testing.  

This is actually a wacky bug, because it's not supposed to try running BITCOIND_PATH unless it checks that it exists.  But somehow it found a non-existent one on your system!  I'll double-check the logic to see how that happened.

I do make clean and compile one more time and I have  still same error

By the way...
Why it takes 2.1GB RSS memory and scan all data every run ?

You will end up with a fresh new download starting at zero percent in the default location.  You can either start it with the --satoshi-datadir option, or you can start it regularly, and change the options to point at the non-standard location, then restart.  If you do it the second way, it will create the default --satoshi-datadir and start downloading.  I guess you could combine the two:  start with --satoshi-datadir, then change the settings to make it permanent.

I'm not sure a better way to do this.  I need to make the process mostly-transparent to new users:  I don't want to walk them through a confusing process when they don't even know what my program is or what Bitcoin is.  I'd rather it "just work".  And for users that have been using Bitcoin-Qt in the default locations:  well it should "just work" by picking up where they last left off with Bitcoin-Qt.  (this means that for switching from Bitcoin-Qt to Armory, it should be actually quite painless).

Yeah, I put the data directory in a non-standard position, but I always start Armory using the satoshi-datadir option, I guess I would be OK then?

Also do I need to delete the old installation? And if I am super paranoid and want to backup the wallet files do I just copy them somewhere else? Thanks.

Not necessary.  Though, if your Bitcoin-Qt home directory (-datadir) is non-standard, it might create one in the standard place and start redownloading.  You can change the settings and restart.  It will pick up where Bitcoin-Qt last left off.

I guess I can just add /var/bitcoin to the search paths

The packaging for Gentoo puts bitcoind in /var/bitcoin and runs it at boot under the bitcoin user. If I fix the permissions such that regular users have read-only access to the block database will Armory be able to work?

I need help testing, especially from the Linux folks, because they're the ones most likely to have non-standard configurations that will break this.

Thanks, do I need to download the blockchain again to test?