It’s time to write about another new fork on the chia skies. After ChainGreen and Flax (article in progress) Spare.farm somewhat launched today at 23:00 UTC. With big promises like being even greener than chia (You can “recycle” chia plots) and the obligatory side blow to Chia’s pre-farm the hopes to find a worthy chia opponent were there. But then, it all went downhill.
I can’t blame them to not foresee the huge amount of interest after ChainGreen being a big failure, but at time of launch their website ceased working and no one could get their software. Working around that issue and finding their github repository posted via their twitter (@GetSpare) I was getting a good step closer.
A quick `git checkout` later and starting the installation I was faced with another issue…. The installer is broken. It does try to access python which is not available on ubuntu (It’s python3 for some versions now). “That’s an easy fix” I thought to myself, changed the installer and then the next issue:
ERROR: Could not find a version that satisfies the requirement miniupnpc==2.1 (from versions: 1.9, 2.0.1, 2.0.2) ERROR: No matching distribution found for miniupnpc==2.1
Whats up there? Oh let’s see… The installer references `https://pypi.spare.net/simple/` which looks like a search and replace error. Should this be chia.net or spare.farm? Well, it most certainly should not be spare.net which is a parked domain not controlled by spare.farm.
At this time I decided it’s time to stop trying. This launch was horrible. There are no windows installers available and the source can’t be successfully installed without changing the code yourself. What’s left to say? When there is a working version of the software, you might expect a follow up article on spare.farm.
Edit: Update from Speedmann about where we are a day later
