Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Timed testing

From: Jorge Timón <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 17 Apr 2014 19:43:35 +0200

Thank you for all the explanations on how to use regtest to reproduce
the example scenarios.
It seems like a private mode wouldn't be particularly helpful for
testing so I won't create a pull request and will just work on the
private chains separately from bitcoind.

Going back to chainparam modes in general, I've heard Sipa complain
some times about regtest being too specific, arguing that some of the
behaviors should be specified as independent parameters instead of
chainparams attributes.
One example could be bool CChainPrams::MineBlocksOnDemand() (see
https://github.com/jtimon/bitcoin/commit/5bd4bc7f3694e46568c9276f0cb26402dfb99718
).
If that was an independent parameter that people set to true when
using regtest, the blocktime param I was proposing for -timedtest
could also be implemented as an independent parameter without any need
for a new mode.

It's not clear to me if the timedtest parameter would be useful for
bitcoind testing or not, but it's just something I've noticed while
playing with this part of the code.
Sipa, is this the kind of thing you refer to when you say regtest is
too specific?
Do you have any suggestion on how to solve the issue as part of PR 3824?

Well, any suggestions from anyone on how to improve PR 3824 are
welcomed, I was just asking specifically to sipa because as said it is
my understanding that he had some complaints about regtest and I think
this is something simple enough for me to start contributing to
bitcoind. Specially given that I was going to review all that part of
the code to externally write the private mode anyway.

-- 
Jorge Timón

http://freico.in/