07:39 <Krellan> Howdy

07:40 <Krellan> Restore Wallet question with an old wallet.dat file

07:41 <Krellan> It now gives an error and tells me to use the Migrate Wallet interface instead, due to legacy format. However, Migrate Wallet requires the wallet to be restored (loaded) first, otherwise it won't appear in the Migrate submenu. Is this a Catch-22?

07:41 <Krellan> I'm wondering if this is intentional. Migrating in an old wallet works just fine in 29.0

07:41 <Krellan> What's the expected workflow for somebody to migrate an old wallet file now?

08:04 <dzxzg> I'm not sure what exact steps you are taking but I just tested migrating a legacy wallet through the GUI on master and it appears in the "Migrate wallet" menu, despite not being loaded, and I am able to migrate it. Does this wallet appear in the "Open wallet" menu but not the "Migrate wallet" menu? This is probably off-topic for this channel but it would be helpful if you could write steps to reproduce this and file an issue on the repo, I'll try to

08:04 <dzxzg> investigate.

08:06 <Krellan> Thanks. How does "Migrate wallet" populate the list? I thought it was just subdirectories in the bitcoin datadir. It doesn't appear in "Open wallet" either, it's a loose file I have.

08:07 <Krellan> I tried making a directory and copying the wallet.dat file in manually. That just gave me an error upon starting bitcoin again: the wallet was in legacy format which is no longer allowed, then it exited before giving me the chance to migrate it.

08:13 <dzxzg> Ah, I see, you could fix the error on startup by removing the wallet from "settings.json" in your datadir, and then you should be able to migrate the wallet from the GUI. The behavior of refusing to start the GUI if a legacy wallet is in settings.json is probably not ideal :)

08:16 <Krellan> thanks, that does seem like an oversight

08:17 <Krellan> i will try that, removing it from settings.json (why is there a settings.json anyway when there's a bitcoin.conf)

08:23 <dzxzg> settings.json is a file that is read from and written into at runtime by bitcoin Core, and is modified by using the GUI and some RPC's, overwriting user configuration files in bitcoin.conf would not have been a good solution, you can read more about the tradeoffs behind the design of settings.json here: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/15935#issuecomment-490641194

08:24 <dzxzg> *user configuration in bitcoin.conf

08:29 <Krellan> smart, that makes more sense then, settings.json dynamically written, bitcoin.conf static as written by user

08:32 <Krellan> i tried renaming the directory that I manually used to hold my old wallet. that produced the error about settings.json not finding the wallet (expected now), however, the problem isn't just settings.json, as the next step, the scan of all the subdirectories in the datadir, found my old wallet and errored out, saying that Berkeley DB wallets no

08:32 <Krellan> longer supported and I should use the migrate interface instead.

08:41 <Krellan> good thing the workaround is just to continue using 29.0 instead of bleeding edge

19:48 <bitcoin-git> [bitcoin] tnndbtc opened pull request #32615: fee estimate test: fix #31944 by handling a legitimate scenario that … (master...fix-fee-estimation-test) https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/32615