It's sometimes useful to test a deployment on other networks than regtest. This may be e.g. because regtest lacks a property relevant for the test, or simply because the test aims to be portable while regtest is Bitcoin Core specific.
This PR makes it possible to set the -vbparams and -testactivationheight options on any network in unit tests, and on any test network as a startup option.
This is preparatory work for a BIP 54 implementation, but may be useful separately.
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For details see: https://corecheck.dev/bitcoin/bitcoin/pulls/35335.
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| Concept ACK | sedited, willcl-ark |
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This encapsulates the soft fork configuration logic as set by the `-testactivationheight` (for
buried deployments) and `-vbparams` (for version bits deployments) options which for the moment
are regtest-only, in order to make them available on other networks as well in the next commit.
Can be reviewed using git's `--color-moved` option with `--color-moved-ws=allow-indentation-change`.
This allows unit tests to set `-testactivationheight` and `-vbparams` on
all networks instead of exclusively on regtest. Those are kept
test-network-only when used as startup parameters.
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🚧 At least one of the CI tasks failed.
<sub>Task test ancestor commits: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/actions/runs/26175913652/job/77006888711</sub>
<sub>LLM reason (✨ experimental): CI failed due to a C++ build error: chainparams.cpp references missing member dep_opts in CChainParams::SigNetOptions (compile error: “no member named 'dep_opts'”).</sub>
<details><summary>Hints</summary>
Try to run the tests locally, according to the documentation. However, a CI failure may still happen due to a number of reasons, for example:
Possibly due to a silent merge conflict (the changes in this pull request being incompatible with the current code in the target branch). If so, make sure to rebase on the latest commit of the target branch.
A sanitizer issue, which can only be found by compiling with the sanitizer and running the affected test.
An intermittent issue.
Leave a comment here, if you need help tracking down a confusing failure.
</details>
Concept ACK
Concept ACK.
Seems generally useful and, if I'm honest, I'm kind of surprised we didn't need/have this ability already.
Are you after this for BIP54 because some of the timestamp/retarget-boundary behavior is awkward to model cleanly on regtest? It seems useful to be able to test deployments on signet/testnet without needing custom chainparams patches in any case.
The BIP 54 test vectors use mainnet headers and blocks for the timewarp(s) test cases and nlocktime-in-coinbase test cases. This is because regtest does not have retargets, and is Bitcoin Core specific. Mainnet is more portable to other clients and closer to what we want to test for, so i went the extra mile and generated valid mainnet blocks / block headers for the BIP test vectors (implementation here, documentation to reproduce here).
