feat: add support for the merge hardfork

[MicaiahReid]

This release (re)introduces support for the Merge! In preparation for the merge, our friends at ethereumjs were working hard on a huge new release with quite a few breaking changes. Because we rely so heavily on the work that ethereumjs does, these breaking changes impacted just about every nook and cranny of the Ganache code base. We wanted to get the merge features to our users as soon as possible, while also doing our due diligence to make sure the sweeping changes made by the ethereumjs upgrade don't affect Ganache's stability. With all that in mind, we released Ganache v7.4.4-alpha.0 back in September with support for the Merge. This PR brings that set of features to our stable release.

This introduces a few important changes and features that are worth explaining.

Important Changes

• Upgrading ethereumjs required dropping support for Node.js v12. In Ganache v7.0.0 we gave a deprecation notice for Node.js v12, and this release finalizes the removal of support for this version. To use Ganache, you'll need to install Node.js v14 or greater.

New Feature

The only new feature that could potentially impact our users is the introduction of the finalized and safe block tags. These can be used with eth_getBlockByNumber, or any other RPC method that receives a block tag:

const finalizeBlock = await provider.request({ method: "eth_getBlockByNumber", params: ["finalized", true] } );
const safeBlock = await provider.request({ method: "eth_getBlockByNumber", params: ["safe", true] } );

Note: These new block tags are aliases for the existing latest block tag.

Fixes #2006, fixes #3693, fixes #3578

[jeffsmale90]

In progress - 77/133 files viewed :/

[jeffsmale90]

Is this event expected to be used externally? If so, is this also a breaking change?

[davidmurdoch]

The @ganache/console.log package is pre-1.0, which means every new version is allowed breaking changes.

[MicaiahReid]

Maybe? Thoughts, @davidmurdoch?

Regardless, the console.log package is at version 0.2.0, so we can break freely

[jeffsmale90]

I think breaking console package is fine, but if updating the console dep in ganache results in breaking ganache changes, that'd be a breaking change for the ganache package too right?

[davidmurdoch]

It would. But it doesn't break anything, I don't think 🙃

[cds-amal]

Thanks for the heads up @MicaiahReid. I'll test this once the Truffle release ships. Truffle pins @ganache/console.log

[davidmurdoch]

LETS DO THIS (after detach mode is released)