[Pkg-bitcoin-devel] miners

[Scott Howard]

On Mon, Dec 10, 2012 at 5:28 PM, Dmitry Smirnov <onlyjob at member.fsf.org> wrote:
> On Tue, 11 Dec 2012 05:57:53 Scott Howard wrote:
>> Since cgminer is a fork of cpuminer, and is more actively maintained
>> than cpuminer - do you think it would be best to just have cgminer?
>
> I think there is a misunderstanding here. "cgminer" and "cpuminer" are two
> completely different projects with different features. I'm not sure if they
> share any code, at least not much.

cgminer is a fork of cpuminer. cpuminer development stopped once
cgminer took off. Some info is here:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Cpu_Miner

and on the official thread:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1925.0
The author of cpuminer says:
"UPDATE:  This has largely been superceded by Con Kolivas's cgminer
fork.  See cgminer's official forum thread for updates and details."

cgminer uses the same code and algorithms for cpumining as cpuminer.
That's why I think it is redundant to have both.

I think we should package cgminer, only.


>
>
>> Are there any features in cgminer that are not present in cpuminer?
>
> Yes, plenty. For example GPU (OpenCL) mining.

I had it backwards: are there any features in cpuminer that are not
present in cgminer? I don't think so.

>
>
>> If
>> there are, could we possibly patch cgminer to include those changes?
>
> No, that would not be possible.

I think there are only 2 commits to cpuminer since the fork with
cgmienr, we could cherrypick those - although one of them is a build
fix (autogen.sh) which already was fixed in cgminer.


>> Let me know what you think. I think Debian would have the same benefit
>> from just have cgminer as it would from having both packages, so
>> perhaps we should just use cgminer.
>
> "cgminer" have more features but "cpuminer" have advantage of speed in case of
> CPU mining as well (I think) it's better suited for litecoin mining.

I'm not so sure about this, they both use the same algorithms for CPU
bitcoin mining, and both use scrypt for litecoin.

"pooler" wrote an improved scrypt algorithm for cpuminer:
https://github.com/pooler/cpuminer

I think pooler's improved scrypt was merged into cgminer already, but
it's unclear which algorithm he's using.
https://github.com/ckolivas/cgminer/blob/master/SCRYPT-README

>
>
>> For license reviews, I've just started using CDBS's license checking
>> targets, which are very helpful:
>>
>> $ make -f /usr/share/cdbs/1/rules/utils.mk debian/stamp-copyright-check
>>
>> will scan all the files and output a DEP-5 formatted
>> copyright_newhints file which you can use as a starting point. If you
>> keep that _newhints file as copyright_hints and run the CDBS check
>> again it will find what files have changed or been added and try to
>> figure out the license and copyright from the header. It's a nice way
>> to keep up with undocumented upstream changes
>
> Thank you for hints. :)
> I tried this in past but found _hints files to be not useful for new upstream
> releases. Usually I manually review old and new orig tars using kdiff3...

great, just looking out in case you find it useful!

~Scott