Well, linux is easy. I am still tinkering with how to persuade it to build static binaries, I can see easy enough that it probably will just run without integrating the shared libraries into it, on most distros, probably, but I'd like to just have the option of download-and-run, portable, and all (It's written that way, pretty much, if you launched it next to the binary via ./steemd
)
I'm working on that today, actually... I have the snapshot here on my pc now, it took some time to get 23gb downloaded, so I can finish the changes to the cmake files to make it do static binaries.
As for windows and mac, well, I'll leave the mac binaries to mac people, I haven't the faintest idea how to do that. Hopefully we can get windows binaries going too. There is absolutely no reason why they can't be made. Of course Docker could be used but I'd rather not force people to use that, handy as it can be, it's just another layer of complexity.
Have you heard of the AppImage project? Many software projects are now offering these stand alone packages for Linux now.
http://appimage.org/
How does this differ from just using docker, which I'm fairly familiar with? You can do that with docker right?
I've been using https://github.com/phusion/baseimage-docker and love it. You can run one or multiple processes, and scheduled stuff. It's a PC in a docker container, and very widely supported by VPS providers, for really simple deployment.
I'm running the same docker container on my laptop, and when I make change, just replace the docker image on the remote machine, it saves state, it's great!
Am I missing some point?
Thanks - I didn't hear about that docker exploit, that's bad for bare-metal docker providers I guess, but won't affect most people who would use VPS or their own PCs.
I see, as long as there will remain a docker container, and preferably an easier to use one. It should not be anything like as difficult to set up a witness as it currently seems!
Excellent! =)
Even popular software such as Gimp is offering .appimage packages along with all of their other standard ones these day. Even Linus Torvolds thinks its a good idea, and he's hard to please.
There's quite a few bits of software that I run this way now, especially if I want to give new development versions a spin, since they may not have landed in the repositories yet. I'm an openSuse user.
I'm looking forward to getting involved when you have something up and running.
BTW, will you establish your own coin for this, or will you use Steem/SBD ?
Which accounts will be carried over? All or start from scratch? That also has implications for existing posts and comments.
Thank you, I'll bring it to the attention of my Steemit artist friends.
Will the be at some point an attempt to get the VESTS or whatever the coin listed on the exchanges? How and if that all happens is something I do not yet understand yet about the crypto space.
What does the blockchain JSON compress to? I'd like to do some analysis, including what takes up space, so we can model how much proposed changes would affect blockchain size/performance.
Ok. My home PC doesn't have enough RAM really, so I may just have a go at running a witness node on your network on an VPN hourly basis for a little while, once you've simplified it a bit, and get it that way.
I meant for the purpose of getting the old chain data, and to learn about the current issues, not adding new blocks, but maybe you're not planning to run the old chain at all? I'm still some way from fully understanding how all these parts fit together too.
On my dev machine I have an SSD drive, but only 20GB of space on it currently, and only has 8GB RAM. I've tended to use VPS or cloud HPC when I've needed more, but I'd be pleased to see the cheap VPS options.
I've got some real-world work to do for a client, but I hope to get on your discord soon. I've never used that before either, so all this is a pretty steep learning curve for me! But I see that as part of the appeal of the opportunity. :)