Looks good

ACK, this is certainly an improvement over what is there

There seems to be a lot of duplication (the example command lines in particular). Mind moving the generation of those to a common method?

Thanks for the comments. I have done a few updates.
I had done this on the 0.8.5 branch and tested the output, but haven't been able to figure out how to build the head to verify it (on centos 5)

Automatic sanity-testing: FAILED BUILD/TEST, see http://jenkins.bluematt.me/pull-tester/53b1b1ade8b4d6605fbf145bb62489627cecae68 for binaries and test log.

This could happen for one of several reasons:

1. It chanages paths in makefile.linux-mingw or otherwise changes build scripts in a way that made them incompatible with the automated testing scripts (please tweak those patches in qa/pull-tester)
2. It adds/modifies tests which test network rules (thanks for doing that), which conflicts with a patch applied at test time
3. It does not build on either Linux i386 or Win32 (via MinGW cross compile)
4. The test suite fails on either Linux i386 or Win32
5. The block test-cases failed (lookup the first bNN identifier which failed in https://github.com/TheBlueMatt/test-scripts/blob/master/FullBlockTestGenerator.java)

If you believe this to be in error, please ping BlueMatt on freenode or TheBlueMatt here.

This test script verifies pulls every time they are updated. It, however, dies sometimes and fails to test properly. If you are waiting on a test, please check timestamps to verify that the test.log is moving at http://jenkins.bluematt.me/pull-tester/current/
Contact BlueMatt on freenode if something looks broken.

@sje1 what problem do you have building head on centos 5?

i was building 8.0.5 by building each dependency (boost, db, openssl), then setting the paths in the Makefile.

on centos 5, not sure how to update or install the latest autoconf

./autogen.sh
configure.ac:2: error: Autoconf version 2.60 or higher is required

on centos 6, autoconf is ok, i couldn't get it to use my boost but it worked with the built-in one, but key.cpp fails with lots of undefined references

key.cpp:184: undefined reference to `EC_KEY_set_conv_form'

The key.cpp errors could have to do with Centos not including the ecc parts of OpenSSL? I remember there was the same issue with Fedora due to patents. Though this would be nothing new with autoconf.

Edit: But is this ready for merging otherwise?

Sounds like you're building against a non-ECC OpenSSL build, indeed.

You need to use fully qualified std::string in the .h file, hence the pull tester errors:

In file included from noui.cpp:8:
bitcoinrpc.h:155: error: ‘string’ was not declared in this scope
bitcoinrpc.h:155: error: ‘string’ was not declared in this scope
bitcoinrpc.h:156: error: ‘string’ was not declared in this scope
bitcoinrpc.h:156: error: ‘string’ was not declared in this scope
make[3]: *** [noui.o] Error 1

@sje1 any luck yet?

If not, mind if I take over this pull request and get it merged before other RPC changes?

Continued in #3246

@laanwj thanks for taking over, i haven't figured out how to build yet :)