Allow mining to be completely disabled on startup

[davidmurdoch]

For complete determinism in our tests, like where we want to be able to compare generated blocks for strict equality, we currently need to set a high blockTime value and then use evm_mine with our desired timestamp. It'd be nice if we could just specify a blockTime of -1 to disable mining completely to always ensure determinism without having to choose an arbitrary blockTime value.

[marcelomorgado]

Will be possible with this new feature that new transactions only be mined when evm_mine be called?

[davidmurdoch]

Yes, that would be the intent.

[marcelomorgado]

Hey, any news about this feature? Thanks!

[pcowgill]

Because ganache-cli is frequently used in tests run during CI and determinism is needed there, I propose this issue gets a higher priority than low.

[davidmurdoch]

We may enable this in the future, but it would be under a new option, something like miner.enabled, where the default is true. @seesemichaelj, thoughts on this for the Filecoin implementation?

[mikeseese]

@davidmurdoch fairly easy to add; I've considered adding it recently for a certain test scenario. I believe this was the intention @tcoulter originally had with miner.automine, but I guess we just misinterpreted since auto and insta are easily confusable.

I can add it in the Filecoin implementation 👍

[davidmurdoch]

@tcoulter was under the impression that you already did this via blockTime === -1.

[mikeseese]

Oh, would you look at that:

A negative blockTime will require mining by manually calling Ganache.MineTipset.

I must be thinking of a different variable, or my internal time machine is warped by all the different changes I've done 😅 I double checked and the code should work that way; I'll need to update that test. Would you like to keep it as is then or would you prefer that blockTime gets set to 0 if it's negative and require a new variable miner.enabled to be set?

[mikeseese]

For anyone following this thread, the above message about a negative block time is only currently available on our upcoming Filecoin-flavored Ganache. As mentioned by @davidmurdoch, this isn't currently supported in the default Ethereum-flavored Ganache

[davidmurdoch]

Would you like to keep it as is then or would you prefer that blockTime gets set to 0 if it's negative and require a new variable miner.enabled to be set?

I suggested adding the blockTime -1 flag to ethereum ganache in an engineering meeting today, and the consensus there was that it weird, that it removes the ability to set an actual blocktime, and this it really is just a different feature and they shouldn't be joined. Those arguments make sense to me.

Since we are going forward with a miner.enabled solution on the Ethereum side, Filecoin probably should, too. Note: it could be called something else still, I'll try to discuss more internally.

[mikeseese]

sounds good, i'll make the changes in @ganache/filecoin

[davidmurdoch]

@seesemichaelj looks like miner.mine (default true) is the winner

[mikeseese]

Ok..what is the accompanying help text/description that's going to make it clear to the user what it does?

[davidmurdoch]

I think it'll be different depending on the chain. For CLI docs, I'll probably go with something like

Enable mining. Set to `false` to pause the miner; call `miner_start` to resume.

[mikeseese]

Ok, I'll add a Ganache.EnableMiner method then?

Also does this mean that Ganache.MineTipset will not mine a tipset when miner.mine = false? The description you provided gives me that impression.

[davidmurdoch]

It would still mine it. evm_mine still works after a call to miner_stop.

[mikeseese]

Do you want one method Ganache.EnableMiner that has a boolean parameter to enable/disable, or two methods with no parameters Ganache.EnableMiner and Ganache.DisableMiner

Also do you want those to be StartMiner and StopMiner (or MinerStart/MinerStop) instead?

[davidmurdoch]

Ganache.EnableMiner and Ganache.DisableMiner sound good

[ko3en]

How can this be done in the latest cli version?

[davidmurdoch]

You need to stop the miner via miner_stop after start up.