Hello All,
I have been working on the code to migrate all the existing wallets to the new protobuf format.
Before releasing it generally I would like some beta testers to try it out.
If you have a bit of time free in the next few days, please download it and test it out.
What the wallet migrate does1) When MultiBit starts up, it sees if there are any serialised wallets (the old type).
2) If there are, it asks the user if it is OK to upgrade now.
3) If user says yes, then loop over each wallet:
3.1) Create a temporary directory and try saving the wallet as protobuf there.
3.2) Load up the test protobuf wallet that was just saved.
3.3) Compare the new and old (same balance, same keys, same transactions).
3.4) Tidy up the temporary directory once the test save is done.
4) If the test save is successful, do it for real by:
4.1) Backing up the existing wallet
4.2) Saving the wallet to protobuf, for real this time.
4.3) Loading the new, real, protobuf wallet and checking again compared to the original (same balance, keys, transactions).
If any of the wallets cannot be migrated:
+ it prints out an error message (in the new Messages window I added in v0.4.0).
+ it keeps the wallet as serialised
+ it marks the wallet with the version of MultiBit that tried to upgrade and will not try again until a new version comes out.
+ it asks the user to mail me the error message shown on screen so that I can some feedback as to where there are problems.
What I would like the beta testers to doI would like beta testers to try it out and report back.
This is to try it out on a larger variety of wallets before I roll it out to everybody. I have tried it out with a few dozen wallets on my machine but they all tend to be quite similar so it is not comprehensive enough.
Test plan:
1)
BACKUP YOUR WALLETS.2) Download the beta from the URL given below.
3) Start up the MultiBit
v0.4.1beta1 v0.4.1beta2. It should ask you at start up if you want to do the migrate.
4) Try it out.
5) The wallets should all then be converted to protobuf. If you expand the wallet detail panel on the left hand panel for each of your wallets you can see the wallet format. It should be 'protobuf'.
6) If there are any failures with the migrate, the user should still have access to their wallet (in the old format).
7) You should see identical functionality with the new wallet format. (At the moment the only apparent difference it that it is smaller and hence quicker to load).
Download URLsThe installer downloads are all on github.com (NOT on the multibit.org website).
They are are the version
0.4.1beta1 0.4.1beta2 downloads here:
https://github.com/jim618/multibit/downloadsIf you do test it out, please let me know how you get on (both good news and bad news are useful feedback).
Thanks in advance !
p.s. The installers aren't fully QAed. There might be some internationalisation terms missing at the moment - just try it out in English.