Hosting electrs release binaries

[ValuedMammal]

I had a question regarding where electrs/esplora release binaries can be hosted now that electrsd is officially part of corepc repo. For integration testing in CI we (BDK) are still using the default URL to fetch binaries from RCasatta/electrsd meanwhile the sha256 hashes reside here along with the electrsd library. This works but I assume we'll eventually want to update the electrs and esplora versions and should decide whether it makes sense to continue pushing updates to RCasatta/electrsd or instead relocate some or all of the release binaries to corepc repo as a natural home. The other reason this came up is that it'd be nice to have a version of esplora built specifically for arm64 to be CI tested on the ubuntu-24.04-arm runner. Thanks

[tcharding]

How coupled are electrsd and @RCasatta's fork of electrs.

I am starting to wish I never pulled bitcoind into a repo I control :(

[tnull]

How coupled are electrsd and @RCasatta's fork of electrs.

See #654 (comment): there is a URL in build.rs that pulls the binary from his Github page.

[tnull]

Yeah, I wondered the same recently and brought it up in the discussion on moving to Forgejo: #654 (comment), because AFAIU that doesn't support binary uploads parallel to Github's release feature.

[tankyleo]

@ValuedMammal @tnull In this PR lightningdevkit/ldk-node#660 instead of fetching the binaries themselves from RCasatta/electrsd we have Github CI build the binaries once for each platform and cache it so that subsequent jobs can fetch the binary directly from the cache.

Could that be a path forward for ldk-node and other repos instead of everybody asking some specific repo to serve the binaries ?

For that PR the current Rcasatta/electrsd binaries are no longer useful because they lack electrum JSON-RPC submitpackage support.

[tnull]

Could that be a path forward for ldk-node and other repos instead of everybody asking some specific repo to serve the binaries ?

It might be a possibility for CI, but for local testing it's exactly the convenience of cargo test without having to setup binaries manually that makes electrsd valuable/attractive at all. If it doesn't ship binaries by default, we might as well just drop the dependency and add some helpers on our end.

[ValuedMammal]

I agree the download feature is useful for local testing though not a hard requirement. I'm inclined to suggest we package builds of Blockstream/electrs on a dedicated branch and upload them to a release page at bitcoindevkit/bdk. That will at least solve BDK's need. In any case the electrsd build script won't be useful either as it still intends to match sha256 hashes against the now ancient esplora a33e97e.