Review Club: test, Call generate RPCs through test framework only, qa: Improve framework.generate* enforcement (#31403 follow-up)

[i-am-yuvi]

Session Details

Date: 30-01-2025
Time: IST 20:00 (UTC 14:30)
Link: PR #31403, PR #31599 (Follow-up)
Difficulty: Easy/Medium

Motivation:

The generate RPCs are special in that they should only be called by the test framework itself. This way, they will call the sync function on the nodes, which can avoid intermittent test issues. Also, when the sync is disabled, it will happen explicitly by setting the sync_fun.

Pre-requisites:

PR #31403
PR #31599 (Follow-up)

Questions:

• What does generate RPCs do?
• What are some of the generate RPCs?
• What's the issue if we don't call generate RPCs from the test framework?
• What's the use of sync_fun?

Learnings:

rpc
tests
qa

[i-am-yuvi]

Answers

• generate rpc in Bitcoin helps in generating or more precisely mining Blocks and Transaction.
• generateblock, generatetoaddress and generatetodescriptor are some of the generate rpcs.
• If we don't call the generate rpcs from the test framework, we'll be having some intermittent test issues such peer's mempool, block synchronization.
• syn_fun is a variable for passing custom synchronization function, if you don't have any then the test will use the default synchronization present in Bitcoin Core.