[Bitcoin-development] Deprecating Bitcoin Core's regtest-specific `setgenerate` behaviour

[Bitcoin-development] Deprecating Bitcoin Core's regtest-specific `setgenerate` behaviour

[Pieter Wuille]

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Hello everyone,

Bitcoin Core's `setgenerate` RPC call has had a special meaning for
-regtest (namely instantaneously mining a number of blocks, instead of
starting a background CPU miner).

We're planning to deprecate that overloaded behaviour, and replace it with
a separate RPC call `generate`. Is there any software or user who would
need compatibility with the old behaviour? We're generally very
conservative in changing RPC behaviour, but as this is not related to any
production functionality, we may as well just switch it.

Note that the bitcoin.org developer documentation will need to be updated.

-- 
Pieter

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Re: [Bitcoin-development] Deprecating Bitcoin Core's regtest-specific `setgenerate` behaviour

[Sean Gilligan]

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I would recommend adding the new method and deprecating (as in warning
against using) the old one for one major release. Then removing it
altogether in the following major release.

I have written a Java RPC client and Groovy/Spock functional tests
<https://github.com/msgilligan/bitcoin-spock> that use the current call.
A separate `generate` or `generateblocks` call is a great idea.

However, I try to keep my tests compatible with the current stable and
unstable versions of Bitcoin Core (and the Omni Core fork) and would
have to write code that checks the RPC server version (or checks for the
presence of the new call, falling back to the old one) to support the
use cases that I need to support. Not a huge deal, but I'm probably not
the only one.

-- Sean


On 4/12/15 7:26 AM, Pieter Wuille wrote:
> Hello everyone,
>
> Bitcoin Core's `setgenerate` RPC call has had a special meaning for
> -regtest (namely instantaneously mining a number of blocks, instead of
> starting a background CPU miner).
>
> We're planning to deprecate that overloaded behaviour, and replace it
> with a separate RPC call `generate`. Is there any software or user who
> would need compatibility with the old behaviour? We're generally very
> conservative in changing RPC behaviour, but as this is not related to
> any production functionality, we may as well just switch it.
>
> Note that the bitcoin.org <http://bitcoin.org> developer documentation
> will need to be updated.
>
> -- 
> Pieter
>
>
>
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