This commit solves several issues concerning the genesis block:
* Genesis/ChainConfig loading was handled by cmd/geth code. This left
library users in the cold. They could specify a JSON-encoded
string and overwrite the config, but didn't get any of the additional
checks performed by geth.
* Decoding and writing of genesis JSON was conflated in
WriteGenesisBlock. This made it a lot harder to embed the genesis
block into the forthcoming config file loader. This commit changes
things so there is a single Genesis type that represents genesis
blocks. All uses of Write*Genesis* are changed to use the new type
instead.
* If the chain config supplied by the user was incompatible with the
current chain (i.e. the chain had already advanced beyond a scheduled
fork), it got overwritten. This is not an issue in practice because
previous forks have always had the highest total difficulty. It might
matter in the future though. The new code reverts the local chain to
the point of the fork when upgrading configuration.
The change to genesis block data removes compression library
dependencies from package core.
Gas estimation currently mostly works, but can underestimate for more funky
refunds. This is because various ops (e.g. CALL) need more gas to run than they
actually consume (e.g. 2300 stipend that is refunded if not used). With more
intricate contract interplays, it becomes almost impossible to return a proper
value to the user.
This commit swaps out the simplistic gas estimation to a binary search approach,
honing in on the correct gas use. This does mean that gas estimation needs to
rerun the transaction log(max-price) times to measure whether it fails or not,
but it's a price paid by the transaction issuer, and it should be worth it to
support proper estimates.
The remote backend is superseded by ethclient.
The nil backend's stated purpose was to enable testing of
accounts/abi/bind. None of its methods actually worked. A much simpler
way to get a crashing backend is to simply pass nil as the backend. With
a one-line change to the generator (removing two explicit interface
assertions), passing nil actually works.
Removing these backends means that less changes are required later.
The account management API was originally implemented as a thin layer
around crypto.KeyStore, on the grounds that several kinds of key stores
would be implemented later on. It turns out that this won't happen so
KeyStore is a superflous abstraction.
In this commit crypto.KeyStore and everything related to it moves to
package accounts and is unexported.
Felix Lange
bas-vk
Péter Szilágyi