Quote from: thethirdtwin on March 07, 2015, 05:13:30 PM

Making Armory portable is the worst experience.
If the developers care to read this, I would encourage making a portable version or incorporate the making of armory portable in the installer.

I'm not sure what you mean by portable. Portable binaries usually implies they do not depend on registry/hive settings to run, nor do they have to install other packages on your machine. This is true for Armory in Windows. You can copy paste the install dir to any compatible machine and Armory will run. On Linux, you can copy the installed lib folder to another machine, and as long as you have the proper Python packages and libstd, it will run too. Granted, on Linux you should just build your own binaries if you want to operate this way. I don't know about OSX, I don't use it.

If you mean something else when you say portable, you should present that.

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issue I have seen is that if the HDD is not plugged in (or isn't mounted) or, for what ever reason, the settings file needs to be reset Armory will start reinstalling the blockchain in the default location, WHICH NEEDS TO BE MANUALLY CLEARED, AND CAN RESULT IN GIGABYTES OF DATA BEING LEFT UNUSED!

If you want to use Armory on partitions that aren't always available to your system or move the entire Core + DB around, you should be manually running BitcoinQt instead of using auto managed bitcoind. That's a default setting, easy to use, press one button and let it do its thing option made available to our users. You can't expect to customize your setup and get a good experience with the default behavior, that's contradictory.

You can disable both torrent download and auto manage bitcoind from the File -> Settings menu. In your case, failing to connect the drive in as you start Armory would result in Armory simply being offline, and no bootstrap would be downloaded.

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Another issue I had in the past was that if the external HDD is removed while Armory is running it completely broke the software and after about a week trying to fix it, I finally had to uninstall the whole damn thing even re-downloading the blockchain, which, as you all know takes a fucking age!

While the new DB is resilient to this kind of abuse (LevelDB is terribly weak on that front), this is outright bad practice. If you're going to run any process against files on removable media, you should respect the remove procedure provided by your OS, which will clearly warn you the media is in use and shouldn't be removed at the moment. Blaming that on us is uncalled for. If you run your car into a wall, are you going to blame the manufacturer because it doesn't run anymore?

You can't expect to use a custom setup and have it convenient at the same time. Also, convenience and security are on the opposite end of a same line. You can place the cursor wherever you see fit, but don't think you can get an extremely secure system that works at the flick of a button. That's called web wallets, and it isn't secure at all.

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Seriously guys, Export Transactions STILL doesn't work

Works in 0.93 afaik

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The bootstrap, it works! Sometimes...

I fixed some major bugs pertaining to bitcoind failures a few days ago, and some more are in the works. Why were these fixed only now? Because we were not aware of them until this moment in time. Why? Because users like you didn't report they were having issues, and we don't experience these on our dev environments.

This is FOSS. You don't pay us and we don't throw user satisfaction surveys are you either. If you want stuff to get better, you have to present us with the issues and help us isolate the bugs. That's the nature of things. Don't expect to get treated any better elsewhere if your approach is to silently endure bugs until you can't take them anymore.