Published on: 2013-05-12T09:04:09+00:00
On May 10, 2013, Gavin Andresen announced the release of Bitcoin-Qt version 0.8.2 release candidate 1. This new version was made available through a SourceForge link provided in an email sent by Andresen. However, upon testing the release candidate, it was discovered that there was a glitch with something breaking.The glitch seemed to be related to an issue on Github, which was reported by Jay F. The issue involved a change in how the data directory was handled. In previous versions, the datadir worked as expected with both bitcoin-qt and bitcoind interacting without any problems when a command-line datadir was specified. However, with the new version, the root datadir data was ignored, and a new hierarchy was created in the subdirectory /testnet3. This change raised confusion for Gavin Andresen, as he did not anticipate this behavior.To further investigate the bug, Andresen tested removing the config file, which resulted in unexpected consequences. His testnet wallet balance appeared as real BTC, and Bitcoin attempted to reorganize 67,662 blocks starting from the genesis block. Eventually, a crash occurred with the error message "Assertion failed!" at line 1745 of the main.cpp file. Andresen noted that this issue should be added to the changelog, as dropping in this binary could potentially break testnet functionality for those using Bitcoin in this way for their testnet faucet, among other things.As a result of this glitch, the testnet data is now stored in the testnet3 subdirectory, regardless of whether a datadir is specified on the command line. Users are advised to manually move their data to the new subdirectory to ensure proper functioning of the testnet.
Updated on: 2023-08-01T04:52:30.959051+00:00