Weekly update on Hive HF24

Hivemind fixes and improvements (social layer microservice)

Added support for computing hot and trending in hivemind (previously this had to be done by hived)

Added support for command-line completion when passing options to start hivemind

Fixed bugs related to when posts are deleted

Fixed bugs in various database_api and bridge_api responses

Fixed a problem computing trending tags

Fixed a bug in get_discussions_by_trending2

Fixed some date-related problems

Improvements to hivemind testing system:

Added the tox virtual environment configuration and testing tool to our automated test system

Added the pytest-xdist plugin to enable running our API tests in multithreaded mode for faster test execution and better utilization of the servers in our build-and-test farm.

Added options to measure test execution time of APIs for performance tracking.

Updated test patterns in cases where the new hivemind has more accurate results than the old hivemind

Hived fixes and improvements (core blockchain code)

Added a virtual op called ineffective_delete_comment_operation to report cases when an operation to delete a post was added to the blockchain, but failed to delete the post because there were already comments or votes associated with the post. This information was needed by hivemind to correctly report on posts that weren’t actually deleted.

Implemented saving of account_history plugin data to disk for making a snaphsot of the blockchain’s state that can be restored to avoid a replay when setting up a new node

Updated hived to allow the major version number to be modified without causing problems during a hardfork

Incorporated additional unit tests for

@howo’s new code for updating worker proposals

Reviewed and tested

@howo’s code for converting treasury Hive to HBD.

Fixed a problem that caused too early conversion of Hive in the treasury fund to HBD in the treasury fund

Plans for upcoming week

We planned to publish a release candidate for hived today, while we continue to test hivemind, but we recently merged in the code for converting Hive in the treasury fund to HBD after our code review, and we didn’t manage to catch all the bugs during the code review.

We found a problem during replay testing that caused this code to trigger before the hardfork date, but unfortunately this test was time-intensive (it takes 18 hours for a replay), so we were only able to detect and fix it today, and haven't yet had time to fully test the fix yet.

We’ve restarted the replay test with the corrected version of the code, so we are hopeful that we will have a release candidate ready late tomorrow or the day after, assuming the replay test passes now.

We’ve tentatively set the final hardfork date in the code to Sept 8th. Our plan is to let witnesses and apps developers have a week with the final code to look for any problems. If no more problems show up in the coming week, then we’ll notify exchanges to begin upgrading their wallets to the new code. This will give exchanges approximately two weeks to update before the hardfork.