#cln #dev

Shahana brought a request to delay startup if bitcoind had gone backwards, rather than refusing to start. This is good for umbrel and like apps where it can happen (disk corruption causes bitcoind to have to resync). Seems simple enough, but that code proved really awkward to work on: so much so it took over two hours for me to get it working without breaking other cases.

"Don't patch bad code, rewrite it" said Kernighan and Plauger. So I spent my afternoon reworking the chain topology startup code to something I wasn't embarrassed by: it now simply and straightforwardly asks for the three pieces of information it needs from bitcoind at startup, then performs initialization. Then later it starts the various polling loops (for fees, and for new blocks).

Adding code to delay is now trivial. And the next person who touches this code will have a much more pleasant time without all the scar tissue which was left from previous incremental changes.