Gavin Andresen - 2011-07-05 21:06:13

I'm thinking about how to do higher-level testing of bitcoin, and I think we could get a lot of mileage out of a testing harness that works at the network protocol level.

I'm thinking of testing things like proper handling of block chain re-orgs and valid and invalid transactions.

Examples:

Block chain re-org test:

Valid/invalid transaction tests


A set of good data files with "tx" and "block" (and "inv" and all the rest) messages in them, combined with something like pexpect could make a good test system. I'm thinking they should be human-readable (with a proxy listening tool or wireshark plugin or something that dumps bitcoin protocol into the human-readable form) but pretty low-level; maybe a version message looks like:
Code:
{ "version" : [ "u32:31900", "i64:1", "i64:1309899496", "addr:127.0.0.1:8333", "addr:127.0.0.1:5432", "u64:1235876", "s:", "i32:98645" ] }


So, before I start working on something like this:  Anybody already doing something similar?