Census Import Sync

[NateWilliams2]

Summary

• Gateways do not download old census by default. This means a new gateway syncing with the network will be missing the census to any active process
• This discussion proposes (among other solutions) a function to import old/active census once a gateway has synced

Details

Background

A bug was discovered that disabled census from being published and imported correctly by gateways. This bug was patched and a hotfix was added to import the census that were published incorrectly. When testing this fix, though, it became apparent that gateway nodes do not import census under any of the following conditions:

• fastsync is running
• the gateway is syncing (without fastsync) and DVOTE_VOCHAINCONFIG_IMPORTPREVIOUSCENSUS is not set

In the immediate future, the hotfix can be applied and the existing census can all be imported to each node by re-syncing from scratch, without fastsync, with the importPreviousCensus flag enabled manually.

Proposal

Moving forward though, at least one of the following should be implemented IMO:

• document that the gateways by default do NOT import existing census, and this can cause active processes to be unusable on newly-synced gateways
• set the gateway.env/example.env files to disable fastsync and enable importPreviousCensus by default, so that gateways will import census by default
• implement a function that runs once, on the completion of fastsync (or normal sync), that imports existing census. This could query for all processes (or for just active/future processes) and import every census found. This would enable nodes to fastsync with the network and then import all census.

this discussion is continued from discord messages with @emmdim and @vdo
cc @p4u