[Pkg-bitcoin-devel] bfgminer package

[Dmitry Smirnov]

Hi Luke,

Thanks for your suggestion.

On Sat, 27 Apr 2013 18:19:07 Luke-Jr wrote:
> Noticed you recently added cgminer to sid.
> Would you perhaps be interested in also (or instead of) adding BFGMiner, which 
> is targetted for ASICs/FPGAs? Additionally, it supports GPU mining using even 
> the free Mesa/LLVM drivers (cgminer requires non-free fglrx).

I'm very much impressed that `bfgminer` can do GPU mining on Mesa
drivers. Well done. This is very attractive feature and to be honest
I'm eager to try it.

However I have some concerns about `bfgminer`. I'm not deeply into
mining and I know little about history of `cgminer` and `bfgminer` so
please forgive my ignorance if my questions are naive and the answers
are considered to be well known.

When I decided to package `cgminer` I had a quick look at `bfgminer`
but I couldn't figure out how is it different from
`cgminer`. Apparently there is no documentation (or I wasn't able to
find it) that highlight improvements over `cgminer`.

Moreover it isn't clear why `bgfminer` exist: `cgminer` is very
actively developed so why forking it? Did you try to merge your
changes with `cgminer`? It appears to me that both projects share so
much in common that existence of fork is hardly justified.  I realise
that `bfgminer` often pulls from `cgminer`. Is there flow of
patches in opposite direction?

Besides I know one particular pool (Ozcoin) that recommend `cgminer`.

I do not wish to bring yet another miner especially if it have little
improvements that couldn't be merged due to lack of cooperation
between authors but not due to technical reasons.

Cheers,
 Dmitry Smirnov
 GPG key : 4096R/53968D1B