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:
- Start a bitcoin client with an empty wallet and just the genesis block, -noirc listening on a non-standard port.
- test harness connects, then feeds it a pre-canned block chain
... then sends it a longer fork - test harness makes sure client accepted the longer chain by sending it a getblocks messsage
(or disconnects and re-connects and checks the start_height in the version message)
Valid/invalid transaction tests
- Start bitcoin client as above
- test harness connects, sends a series of valid and invalid transactions (via inv message and then responding to getdata).
- test harness checks to see if transactions were accepted or rejected by checking responses to getdata (should be no response for invalid transactions)
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?