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.
There is no need to depend on the old context package now that the
minimum Go version is 1.7. The move to "context" eliminates our weird
vendoring setup. Some vendored code still uses golang.org/x/net/context
and it is now vendored in the normal way.
This change triggered new vet checks around context.WithTimeout which
didn't fire with golang.org/x/net/context.
We have decided to bump the requirement to Go 1.7 because it enables
subtests and allows dropping backwards-compatibility code. This is in
line with Go's support policy. Go 1.6 and earlier no longer receive
security updates.
The cache/dataset methods crashed with a nil pointer error if
cachesinmem/dagsinmem were zero. Fix it by skipping the eviction logic
if there are no caches/datasets.
Search always used the regular dataset size regardless of test mode. Fix
it by removing the redundant size parameter of hashimotoFull.
Fixes#3784
Metadata is provided as JSON string, rather than as JSON object. This
ensures that we can decode to a set of bytes that will be consistent
with the swarm hash embedded in the code, without worrying about
ambiguities of spacing, ordering, or escaping.
