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.
The need for these functions comes up in code that actually deploys and
uses contracts. As of this commit, they can be used with both
SimulatedBackend and ethclient.
SimulatedBackend gains some additional methods in the process and is now
safe for concurrent use.
Felix Lange
Jeffrey Wilcke