The reason for the bounty is to see if Sidhujag's Daemon makes devcoin blocks that the old clients accept. We just need a single block for that. If it does, then we can make Sidhujag's the official client and archive the old one.
you need more than a single block. the new client needs to run side by side with the old client for a period of time and a number of blocks to ensure the chains don't diverge. there is a significant amount of testing needed by a pool operator here so they deserve a large bounty. not to mention the risk if the devcoin damon causes a bitcoin block to be lost. that's $25,000 that the pool operator would owe its miners.
has the new client been tested using 'bitcoin in a box' style testing? that is a closed network for testing merge mining and normal mining.
devcoin doesnt hav ea testnet so we couldnt run it live ona testnet, the only thing I did was do atest in abox setup which finds blocks on a new testnet running locally... it found those blocks using the mining proxy thats available from namecoin which calls the getauxblock rpc call in the code. It worked fine, but it wasnt merged mined because for that we need a devcoin node running the testnet that we can connect to