This commit adds pluggable consensus engines to go-ethereum. In short, it
introduces a generic consensus interface, and refactors the entire codebase to
use this interface.
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.
Péter Szilágyi
Felix Lange