No you're reading it wrong. It will not mine solo unless you go to the effort of setting up bitcoind AND adding it as a pool and NOT follow the instructions that discretely say to add a btc address. It does NOT change default behaviour one bit for existing miners with existing configurations.
EDIT: Or is your concern existing solo miners? The previous versions of cgminer could not meaningfully mine solo so I didn't think anyone was trying to.
My concern was existing solo miners.
I have always had bitcoind running and I was mining with these options:
cgminer -o
http://127.0.0.1:8332 -u bitcoinrpc -p $PASSWORD
cgminer was displaying this:
Connected to 127.0.0.1 diff 4.25G without LP as user bitcoinrpc
Given that the difficulty matched the network difficulty I always assumed it was solo mining, was it not? How was I not mining "in a meaningful way" ? =)
Also I always assumed that cgminer would ask bitcoind for an address for the mined btc, in a similar way in which it asks for the difficulty.
The fact that it could have been sending the mined btc to some hard-coded address belonging to you really didn't cross my mind, and I still think it's a bit strange as a default. =/
So that's why when I read the 4.2.0 release notes I thought that this was a change in behaviour.
Were versions of cgminer previous to 4.2.0 already using your hard-coded address if one didn't specify --btc-address ?
Wouldn't it be possible to have the receiving address always displayed by cgminer while running? That would avoid any confusion, and would be quite an important piece of information to have. =)