Issue with getBlockByNumber("pending")

[hyperledger]

Issue with getBlockByNumber("pending")

[timbeiko]

Related comments from an old issue:

Currently we treat the "pending" argument the same as the "latest" argument, which is to say our pending state is our latest state with no alterations. We should investigate what it would take to alter this.

If we are mining, then the pending state would be our candidate block we are mining or preparing for signing. This may not always be available in the cases were the consensus algorithm has a round-robin type setup where we only mine on turn. But those also tend to have fallbacks for when a producer fails to produce a block, and we need to keep our state handy.

If we are not mining then we should consider creating a temporary state including as many of the transactions in the pending pool as are reasonable. This could be tricky because the pool could contain contradictory or mutually exclusive transactions, such as duplicate nonce or TXes that drain a common resource. And how much CPU time should be spent producing these transactions.

Finally we need to plumb this data into the JsonRpc classes, likely through BlockChainQueries.

[timbeiko]

I don't think this is relevant given that Besu is unlikely to add pending block support. If that's not the case, feel free to copy/paste this into a new issue. cc: @sajz