This commit provides a new flag, --nocheckpoints, to disable built-in
checkpoints.
Checkpoints are used for a number of things such a ensuring
the block chain being downloaded matches various known good blocks,
allowing quicker verification on old blocks since scripts don't have to be
executed, and preventing forks from old blocks, etc.
This commit adds environment variable expansion and path cleaning to the
data directory. This allows the user to specify data paths in the config
file such as datadir=~/.btcd/data and datadir=$SOMEVAR/btcd. It also
adds usage instructions and an example to the sample btcd.conf file.
This commit modifies the way the data paths are handled. Since there will
ultimately be more data associated with each network than just the block
database, the data path has been modified to be "namespaced" based on the
network. This allows all data associated with a specific network to
simply use the data path without having to worry about conflicts with data
from other networks.
In addition, this commit renames the block database to "blocks" plus a
suffix which denotes the database type. This prevents issues that would
otherwise arise if the user decides to use a different database type and
a file/folder with the same name already eixsts but is of the old database
type. For most users this won't matter, but it does provide nice
properties for testing and development as well since it makes it easy to
go back and forth between database types.
This commit also includes code to upgrade the old database paths to the
new ones so the change is seamless for the user.
Finally, bump the version to 0.2.0.
This change paves the way for saving more than just the block database to
the filesystem (such as address manager data, index data, etc) where the
name "dbdir" no longer makes sense.
When running in regression test mode, it is unlikely the user wants to
connect to permanent peers they have configured in their config file.
This commit modifies the code to ignore the config file entry when in
regression test mode. The user can still provide -a (or --addpeer) on the
command line to override this if they really want to connect out to a
specific peer during regression test mode.
Although not required if the proxy set is indeed Tor, setting this option
does the following:
- Sends DNS queries over the Tor network (during dns seed lookup). This
stops your IP from being leaked via DNS.
- Does not disable the listening port. This allows the hidden services
feature of Tor to be used.
