[Bitcoin-development] zapwallettxes problem and wallet DB ordering

[Bitcoin-development] zapwallettxes problem and wallet DB ordering

[Travis Johansen]

Most of the issue seems to be because of
CWalletDB::ReorderTransactions. After applying zapwallettxes, I
noticed that listtransactions was no longer listing new transactions.
After further investigation, new tx records were being given a low
nOrderPos number while old acentry records were high enough that they
were being ordered at the end of listtransactions all the time. My
theory is that after the malleability attacks, the wallet DB got
filled with dead transactions that were removed by zapwallettxes, then
somehow ReorderTransactions got invoked and reset nOrderPosNext. This
left the acentry records with high nOrderPos and the new transactions
being added near the beginning.

I believe this is due to two issues:

1. ReorderTransactions only collects the acentry records from "":

    ListAccountCreditDebit("", acentries);

   which should probably be:

    ListAccountCreditDebit("*", acentries);

2. ReorderTransactions seems to try too hard to maintain previous
ordering and likely fails. Or at least it did after I applied the fix
above. Would it not be better to just reorder the records with:

    for (TxItems::iterator it = txByTime.begin(); it != txByTime.end(); ++it)
    {
        CWalletTx *const pwtx = (*it).second.first;
        CAccountingEntry *const pacentry = (*it).second.second;
        int64_t& nOrderPos = (pwtx != 0) ? pwtx->nOrderPos :
pacentry->nOrderPos;

        nOrderPos = ++nOrderPosNext;
        if (pwtx)
        {
            if (!WriteTx(pwtx->GetHash(), *pwtx))
              return DB_LOAD_FAIL;
        }
        else
            if (!WriteAccountingEntry(pacentry->nEntryNo, *pacentry))
              return DB_LOAD_FAIL;
    }

    if (!WriteOrderPosNext(nOrderPosNext))
        return DB_LOAD_FAIL;

   Perhaps I'm missing something here but this seems to be a better
solution given the simplicity of the ordering system.

Unsurprisingly, applying the two fixes (and hacking one entry to an
nOrderPos of -1 to trigger ReorderTransactions) corrects the ordering
in my wallet DB. Or at least I think it does. Does anyone know why
this might be a bad idea? I'm new to the code and would like to know
if I'm potentially breaking something else.