Exploring the Dogecoin Rosetta implementation #6

The rosetta-dogecoin project requires Go. I didn’t have an up-to-date version of Go, so I went about installing it. I found installing Go on Ubuntu difficult. The installation directions assumed a GUI interface where mine was CLI. The default method of installing Go handles putting the exe in the right place and pointing the $PATH variable to it; however, the DL page didn’t make it obvious where to DL the Go binary from. I copied the link from my Windows GUI and curled it, but it gave me an anchor tag. It didn’t click right away that I should curl the link from the anchor tag, i.e. the right thing to do, so I searched for another route.

After I had issues with the default method of installing Go, I saw the “Installing Go from source” page. I figured my Ubuntu setup is CLI, and I saw installing from source as more CLI-y, so I spent a while figuring out how to install Go from source, which required running Bash scripts, putting it in a special folder, updating the path to that folder. I failed the source method of installation because Go couldn’t find the badger db or ed25519 cryptography packages with go get ./..., ran through the make deps command. I didn’t have enough familiarity with the $PATH or how Linux works with executables (see 4.8?). Despite my programming experience, it was still voodoo to me.

While studying the source installation method, I got the flash, the idea to curl the link in the anchor tag. This turned out to be right, and it made things work. After I learned to curl from the link in the anchor tag, and after I learned to use the –output flag, and after I learned to use sudo with the command to clear up previous installations, and sudo after the && which lets it extract the exe to the protected area, and after I learned to export the Go directory to the path, I finally installed a proper version of Go 1.16.3 the right way. When I ran make deps, the command which gave me much fury over the inability to download the badger db and ed25519 cryptography packages, it ran so quietly that I feared it wasn’t working–but it did. It works.

I will be messing with the rosetta-dogecoin-api shortly, and I will report my findings–esp. what checks it is and isn’t passing.