The official Armory-for-OSX Bounty Thread [CLAIMED -- 25 BTC]

[etotheipi]

Total Bounty Accumulated:      24.75 BTC
(last updated, Mar 10, 1:10am EST)
(Donation address on blockchain.info)


User "higuys" has claimed the bounty!   More information here.

You can get the first unofficial release of the OSX build from this thread!

Original Message:

The number of users offering bounties for a native OSX package for Armory has reached critical mass.  Red Emerald has done a phenomenal job making it available through some brew commands at the terminal, but it's not a long-term solution.  Eventually, Armory needs to be accessible to the audience of users that have never seen a terminal.   So, I'm announcing a official bounty for anyone who gives me a solid "recipe" for distributing Armory on OSX:

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

The following address is owned by Alan Reiner (Core Armory
Developer) and will be used to collect donations to be given
as a bounty for the successful packaging of Armory for OSX.  
All donations will be maintained by Alan Reiner, and
distributed at his sole discretion.  

1Armory1HBqc8dNEvHDuT9AYWPWf98aCzJ

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I will hold onto the funds and decide how to distribute it.  I will not distribute any to myself, unless there is some reasonable consensus that I should do so (like, I ended up figuring it out myself because no one else did).  Otherwise, I will look to this thread for feedback, and then will make the decision how to proceed.  Partial credit is possible.  

Red Emerald has mentioned that bundling Armory is not easy.  py2app didn't work smoothly at all.  There's a few awkward dependencies, including bundling PyQt4 in its entirety.  Luckily, I know that the Bitcoin-Qt dev team has successfully bundled Qt4 into their package, so their packaging scheme might serve as a good starting point for this task.

@Red Emerald: Of course, I was looking in your direction to be the exalted warrior of this bounty, but there is no obligation.

I don't currently have a developer key for OSX, but I plan to get one eventually so that I can properly sign the OSX packages. I prefer a solution that extends easily to being natively signed, but I guess I'd still be happy with any kind of standalone packaging.  It's worth discussing in this thread what can be done to guarantee the solution allows for that (or acknowledge that any correct solution is signable).




Some of you may have seen my previous rant about how I don't like bounties of this form, and much prefer to raise money to pay someone to work on it up front.  Part of the justification for that rant is that most projects for which bounties are declared, may require months of work, and do not have a clear definition of success -- especially when inter-project priorities change, feasibility issues justify changing directions, and there is vast disagreement about what is "complete", etc.  In this case, I think the task is relative short, and the exit criteria is pretty clear, so there shouldn't be any controversy about it.  

I'd also like to see this thread used for collaboration.  If there is significant progress made through the collaboration with others in this thread, then I will probably decide to split the bounty.   Any splits will be in increments of 10% only.  I will not be giving 0.36% to one, 1.83% to another, etc.  If people feel like they deserve a small piece for their contribution, they can ask the person who received the bounty to toss them a few bits!  Otherwise, your reward for contributing is that you helped make the OSX distributable package possible!

[etotheipi]

First order of business:  I strongly believe that Red Emerald should receive 5-10% of this bounty regardless of any further contributions by him.  Without his help, there might not have been any OSX support for Armory, at all.  And I'm sure his brew installation will be extremelyt useful in figuring out what dependencies are needed, etc.

Discuss! (and donate!)

[evoorhees]

SatoshiDice just donated 10 btc. Big fan of Armory

[Severian]

1.75 btc donated. Will donate more on completion or good enough, whatever comes first.

Thanks for getting around to this, etotheipi.

[etotheipi]

Wow, excellent!  Already at about $1,000 USD.  Given the nature of this task, and the amount collected so far, I bet this will be a very effective bounty campaign!

[bitbutter]

Donated! I'd love to see this happen.

[etotheipi]

Haha, whoops.  I should've created a new wallet for this.  All the donations are showing up in my donation wallet along with my other donations.   They are, of course, intended for the bounty, but I just want to mention that I may accidentally "spend it".  I will try to remember to use coin control to avoid doing so, but if I forget, the coins may end up moving...

For that reason, I will be going by total BTC received by that address, not how much is still in it when the bounty is to be paid.  Just wanted to clarify that.

[justusranvier]

If you publish this donation address somewhere on your web site we could use the blockchain.info tag feature to mark it.

[etotheipi]

If you publish this donation address somewhere on your web site we could use the blockchain.info tag feature to mark it.

I just added it to the webpage under the OSX section:

http://bitcoinarmory.com/get-armory/

[Node]

OSX developer here, currently checking whats involved to get a working solution.

Are you looking for a self installing package(requires root/admin password to install)? or a bundle(dependencies are bundled)?, either?

[Chris911]

Why is it not on Github?

[etotheipi]

Why is it not on Github?

I'm not sure what you mean.  All the code is on github.  But we can't have regular users installing Xcode, Python, Qt4, etc, and compiling from source.  Unfortunately, to make a standalone installer, all that needs to be included somehow.  

Actually, I just got a PM from someone who claims to have done something like this already!  He's stuck in the Newbies forum, but will post here soon.  He said was able to jam everything into a .app and it works.  But it's 232 MB.  I suspect that most of it can be pruned out.  For reference, the Windows installer (*.msi) has everything and is less than 20 MB.

Question:  is *.app what I want?  Is that a sign-able container?  Is it easily converted to a .dmg? Or pkg?  What do I want?  (I don't even know, myself)

EDIT: upon reviewing what he said, I suspect that 180 MB is instantly removable:  the entire cppForSwig directory and the .git directory.  If so, this may already be in a usable state.   Anyone have comments about the idea of bulk including a python installation, PyQt4, etc?  It would require me updating them when necessary, but on the other hand, it reduces the number of libraries that are system-dependent (and thus, probably also increases security a bit).

[picobit]

I am looking into this too.  Yes, you want a .app.  I am trying to build it with py2app, but the problem right now is that it corrupts the PyQt dynamic libraries.  I am trying to manually copy the libraries into the .app and then fix the linked-in paths so it will run as a standalone app on another machine.  With a bit of luck, I expect to have a solution in an hour or so.  But I need that bit of luck, I cannot claim that I know what I do.

[vamdor]

Anyone have comments about the idea of bulk including a python installation, PyQt4, etc?

The python interpreter itself isn't really big when compiled into an executable. I used the freeze tool earlier (http://wiki.python.org/moin/Freeze) and it's pretty straightforward, and the result is truly stand-alone, and very convenient to deploy.

I spent the last hour or so trying to get PyQt and friends compiled/installed in a virtualenv, and this seems to be a nightmare. After this I am convinced that any user-friendly distributions should include it as compiled into the frozen bytecode.

[Daily Anarchist]

I really like the bounty idea. Any chance of you doing that for the rest of Armory development? I mean, I'd really like to see a Bitcoin Armory rpm for fedora users. Slap up a bounty and I'll donate to it, eventually there's bound to be enough fedora users that would like to have that. It was a real workaround for me to figure out how to get Bitcoin Armory to work for me on Fedora.

[etotheipi]

I really like the bounty idea. Any chance of you doing that for the rest of Armory development? I mean, I'd really like to see a Bitcoin Armory rpm for fedora users. Slap up a bounty and I'll donate to it, eventually there's bound to be enough fedora users that would like to have that. It was a real workaround for me to figure out how to get Bitcoin Armory to work for me on Fedora.

I'll offer a bounty to fix the makefile.  Seriously, all I need is the simplest of checks in the make file, and Armory compiles super-cleanly on all these *nix distributions.  Once the makefile goes looking for the .so instead of .a, having any versions of the dependencies should be sufficient. 

But yes, there will probably be more bounties in the future, to help with related things.  As long as they are well-contained, easily-verifiable problems, I am for bounties...

[Daily Anarchist]

I really like the bounty idea. Any chance of you doing that for the rest of Armory development? I mean, I'd really like to see a Bitcoin Armory rpm for fedora users. Slap up a bounty and I'll donate to it, eventually there's bound to be enough fedora users that would like to have that. It was a real workaround for me to figure out how to get Bitcoin Armory to work for me on Fedora.

I'll offer a bounty to fix the makefile.  Seriously, all I need is the simplest of checks in the make file, and Armory compiles super-cleanly on all these *nix distributions.  Once the makefile goes looking for the .so instead of .a, having any versions of the dependencies should be sufficient. 

But yes, there will probably be more bounties in the future, to help with related things.  As long as they are well-contained, easily-verifiable problems, I am for bounties...

I'll donate if you'll just put the instructions I offered on the install page under the ubuntu instructions.

[etotheipi]

I'll donate if you'll just put the instructions I offered on the install page under the ubuntu instructions.

Can you link me?

[Daily Anarchist]

I'll donate if you'll just put the instructions I offered on the install page under the ubuntu instructions.

Can you link me?

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=56424.msg1463846#msg1463846

[justusranvier]

I really like the bounty idea. Any chance of you doing that for the rest of Armory development? I mean, I'd really like to see a Bitcoin Armory rpm for fedora users. Slap up a bounty and I'll donate to it, eventually there's bound to be enough fedora users that would like to have that. It was a real workaround for me to figure out how to get Bitcoin Armory to work for me on Fedora.

There's not even a current Bitcoin-Qt rpm for Fedora, is there?