Documentation for Usage and Options about cpuminer HOT 9 CLOSED

I think a man page is a good idea. I will try to put one together.

Regarding your doubts about the mining server, remember that a miner (be it cpuminer, cgminer, or any other miner) can never work as a completely standalone application: it always needs a "source" to get work from (and to submit solutions to). The mining server is such work provider. In the case of pooled mining, this is usually a remote server the miner needs to connect to; the exact URL you need can normally be found on your pool's website (usually in the "Getting Started" section). In the case of solo mining, the mining server is usually a local instance of a *coin (Bitcoin, Litecoin, ...) client. I wrote "usually" because many different setups are actually possible: for instance, one could run a local pool, or connect to a remote pool via a mining proxy running locally. If you don't specify a mining server, minerd defaults to the standard settings for connecting to a Litecoin client running on localhost (as --help says).

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Ah ok, thanks for the explanation! 👍

If you need help with the man page, let me know, I have a few hour here and there to at least do a proof-read :)

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Alright, commit 68f6edb adds a man page.
You can read it with groff -man -Tascii minerd.1 | less, or by invoking man minerd after a successful make install.
Please let me know if you find errata or if there are points that are not clear.

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looking awesome :D

I would add an example of connecting to a local litecoin client and pointing out that you have to setup the litecoin client for that to work, "if litecoin is setup locally and correctly, you can connect to to an instance of it".

The description for -B option should have the word "daemonize" or the phrase "run as a daemon" in it. That covers both "background" and "daemonize" which some people prefer.

If the config file format is described somewhere, it should be noted in the -c option or if there's a default or template config file that should be noted. If there's a longer description of the config file, it should be a new section of the man page.

The -O, -p and -u flags are confusing. If I use -O and then use -p, which one will discard which flag's information? Maybe an example of this can be added to the Examples section just to make sure it's clear instead of overloading the description of each flag.

^^ sorry if that's a lot of criticism, I'd do the editing and submit a pull request, I just have never edited a man page directly before :S :S

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Thank you for your feedback!

Personally I don't think the description of -O, -p and -u is ambiguous. The description of -p, for instance, clearly states that "any password previously set with -O is discarded", which means that only the last password you set is considered. I also wouldn't add an example where both -O and -p are used, because that is clearly bad practice. The behavior might be useful for writing scripts, so it's good to document it, but I'd rather not give an example for users to abuse.

I also don't think it would be appropriate to talk about setting up a Litecoin/Bitcoin/Namecoin/... server. It would be as if the man page of wget said that you must first have Apache/nginx/lighttpd/... running. A miner is by definition a client application, so it's obvious that a server must be running and correctly configured if one wants to connect to it.
By the way, minerd only defaults to connecting to localhost:9332 for historical reasons; solo mining Litecoin (especially with a CPU miner) does not constitute a common use case anymore. I am actually considering changing this behavior so that the -o option becomes mandatory.

I agree about expanding the description of the -c option. A configuration file must contain a JSON object associating the name of a long option (e.g. retry-pause) to its value, or to true if no argument is required. The repository includes an example configuration file, maybe we could add a shorter version of it as an example.

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That's a great point, and it's easy to check & correct what's happening if someone is messing up the order of the flags.

You're already mentioning that the daemon supports a particular protocol, so yeah, no point in talking about servers. I did solo mining for a few days and it's not worth the time to do it, making the -o flag mandatory sounds good to me.

Yeah, I think just saying that example-cfg.json is available as part of the package or link to it in the repo or something would be good enough for now.

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04344f8 expands the description of the -c option.

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@pooler LGTM, close the issue?

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Closing! Thanks again for your suggestions.

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