Notice: proposed removal of dfx bootstrap and dfx replica commands

[ericswanson-dfinity]

The dfx bootstrap and dfx replica commands each provide part of the functionality that dfx start does:

• dfx bootstrap launches icx-proxy.
• dfx replica launches replica or ic-ref, ic-btc-adapter, ic-https-outcalls-adapter, and so forth.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of differences:

• dfx stop stops the processes launched by dfx start, but not by dfx bootstrap or dfx replica.
• If the replica process exits, dfx start will restart the icx-proxy process after restarting the replica. dfx bootstrap can't do this.
• dfx replica by default runs the replica on port 8080, while dfx start uses a random port.
• There's no way past Error: The network configuration was changed. Run dfx start with --clean. from dfx replica

But most of all, there is considerable overhead in maintaining these separate commands. We have to accompany any change to dfx start with an equivalent change to one of the other two commands, and have to test those changes too.

We could spend time and effort to correct some of this, but if there isn't a strong rationale for using dfx bootstrap and dfx replica instead of dfx start, we'd be better off removing them.

So we're proposing to remove the dfx bootstrap and dfx replica commands altogether. We'd deprecate them in an upcoming version and remove them after that.

If you have a good reason why we should keep the dfx bootstrap and dfx replica commands, please tell us here!

[ericswanson-dfinity]

Removed in dfx 0.15.0.