Not possible to be used as the previous consensus could. It will not
produce blocks nor does it currenly even instantiate a machine. This is
just he next step.
Multiple traits exist to verify/handle blocks. I'm unsure exactly when
each will be called in the pipeline, so the easiest solution is to have
every step run every check.
That would be extremely computationally expensive if we ran EVERY check,
yet we rely on Substrate for execution (and according checks), which are
limited to just the actual import function.
Since we're calling this code from many places, it makes sense for it to
be consolidated under TendermintImport.
Unfortunately, this immediately makes Tendermint machine capable of
deployment as crate since it uses a git reference. In the future, a
Cargo.toml patch section for serai/substrate should be investigated.
This is being done regardless as it's the quickest way forward and this
is for Serai.
1) Commit didn't include the round, leaving the clock in question.
2) Machines started with a local time, instead of a proper start time.
3) Machines immediately started the next block instead of waiting for
the block time.
For a hash, which is fixed-size, these should be the same yet this helps
move past the dependency on SCALE. It also, for any type where the two
values are different, smooths integration.
Ideally, this would be generic. Unfortunately, the generic API serde
doesn't natively support borsh, nor SCALE, and while there is a serde
SCALE crate, it's old. While it may be complete, it's not worth working
with.
While we could still grab bincode, and a variety of other formats, it
wasn't worth it to go custom and for Serai, we'll be using SCALE almost
everywhere anyways.
Unbeknowst to me, height doesn't have a universal definition of the
chain length.
Bitcoin defines height as the block number, with getblockcount existing
for the chain length.
Ethereum uses the unambiguous term "block number".
Monero defines height as both the block number and the chain length.
Instead of arguing about who's right, it's agreed it referring to both
isn't productive. While we could provide our own definition, taking a
side, moving to the unambiguous block number prevents future hiccups.
height is now only a term in the Monero code, where it takes its
Monero-specific definition, as documented in the processor.
