[Pkg-bitcoin-devel] Armory - Looking for Sponsor

[Tristan Seligmann]

Hi Joseph,

First of all, sorry that I was not able to look at this sooner; I
suspect it may be too late to get Armory into Jessie at this stage,
which is a shame. However, there is still a possibility of a backport
once Jessie is released.

On 7 October 2014 17:05, Joseph Bisch <joseph.bisch at gmail.com> wrote:
> Version 0.92.3 of Armory was just released the other day. I packaged
> it today and uploaded it to mentors[0]. I am still looking for a
> sponsor for Armory.

I've taken a look at this package, and found a few issues. Most of
them should be easy to fix, but I did find one problem (7) which looks
like it will be harder to resolve:

1) You remove the embedded copy of BitTornado which is good, but
Depends: bittornado is missing from the binary package, and Armory
will not start for me without it installed.

2) The git repository referenced in debian/control does not have your
latest changes. I think if you join pkg-bitcoin on Alioth, we could
move this into a repository under pkg-bitcoin.

3) The package has an embedded copy of qt4reactor.py; this file has
some slight changes from the version shipped in the python-qt4reactor
package in Debian, but they are unimportant (LICENSE file was moved,
some blank lines added, and some win32-only imports commented out).
Removing the embedded qt4reactor.py in the clean target (and adding
Depends: python-qt4reactor) seems to work fine.

4) Armory requires connecting to a running bitcoind to work. While
connecting to a remote instance on a different server is possible (at
least, I believe so?), most users will want bitcoind installed
locally, so I think there should be a Recommends: bitcoind.

5) dh_auto_test is disabled in debian/rules; I see that the tests fail
to run if I reenable it. I did not look into this further, but I was
wondering if you had looked at it; it would be good to run the tests
at build time if possible.

6) The Help -> About dialog gives the version as "0.92.3-beta". The
"-beta" string appears to be hardcoded into qtdialogs.py; this seems
like an upstream problem, unless perhaps something in the build is
supposed to be replacing this string (I did look at the
release_scripts directory, but did not see anything that would modify
qtdialogs.py).

7) Since I had not run bitcoind on the system I tested with, Armory
wanted to download the blockchain bootstrap files by BitTorrent.
However, this fails with the following error:

(ERROR) ArmoryUtils.py:3080 - Error in pybkgdthread: 'upnp_nat_access'
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/armory/armoryengine/ArmoryUtils.py", line 3078, in run
    self.output = self.func()
  File "/usr/lib/armory/armoryengine/ArmoryUtils.py", line 3015, in funcPartial
    return thefunc(*args, **kwargs)
  File "/usr/lib/armory/armoryengine/torrentDL.py", line 398, in
doTheDownloadThing
    upnp_type = UPnP_test(config['upnp_nat_access'])
KeyError: 'upnp_nat_access'

This seems to be caused by version skew between the upstream code, and
the version of bittornado in Debian; torrentDL.py includes some code
copied from bittornado, but this code is different in the version in
Debian (config file variables are different, among other things).
While this does not render Armory completely unusable (there are other
ways to do the initial blockchain download), it is inconvenient and
confusing for users.
-- 
mithrandi, i Ainil en-Balandor, a faer Ambar