Re: [Bitcoin-development] A critique of bitcoin open source community

[Peter Todd <pete@petertodd.org>]

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On Sat, Oct 19, 2013 at 05:52:49PM -0700, Jean-Paul Kogelman wrote:
> Interesting. The main reason I wrote my proposal was because the only proposal that came close to covering the same area was BIP 39, which at that time had 2 paragraphs of text (although admittedly did link to a text file off site where the draft was being developed). And currently there are 2 proposals that have numbers allocated but are empty (BIP 40 and 41) with no references to the development or discussion.
> 
> I appreciate the fact that acceptance of proposals on the BIP page are more strict, but it may be desirable to have the enforcement be more uniform. Also, BIP 38 is gaining more acceptance out in the community (many sites support the import of these keys and a growing number of paper wallet sites / coin / card vendors are offering it as an option), yet it's still missing from the BIP list, which seems to me a bit counter to the arguments given about community acceptance.

No, that just means the authors of BIP 38 know community acceptance is
the most important thing; BIP numbers are secondary.

FWIW I think that BIP's should have been done as a github repository,
allowing for dealing with this stuff transparently as a pull-request.
It'd also be useful to handle BIP's that way to make it easy to archive
them, update them, and keep a log of what and why they were updated.
Just put them in markdown format, which is pretty much feature
equivalent to the wiki now that markdown supports images.

> > FWIW I myself haven't pushed hard for getting an "official" BIP number
> > for my draft NODE_BLOOM BIP, even though I've got support from most of
> > the dev team on the pull-request:
> > https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/2900 I'm probably at the point
> > where I could get one assigned - Litecoin for instance has made that
> > change - but really I just see that as a formality; that it's still a
> > controversial idea is much more relevant.
> 
> 
> > In any case I don't see any working code in your email, I'd suggest
> > writing some. You're BIP would be much more likely to be accepted if you
> > were more involved in wallet development.
> 
> Good point. I'm developing my own client (which has the code up and running, with unit tests), but I'm not ready to release it just yet until I've got all the client's alpha features working. Would putting contact information there so people can ask for the relevant code be sufficient until I have my client up on github?

No, just put the client up on github. If you think actually using it is
dangerous, just delibrately make it hard to use for people who shouldn't
be using it. Leave out compilation documentation for instance, or make
it check that it's on testnet first and refuse to run if it isn't.

Pond for instance doesn't make binaries available:
https://pond.imperialviolet.org/ IIRC only recently have they provided a
makefile.

-- 
'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org
000000000000000b647feda1820ad95b2ea9efb742e9087b022bd3d37530dc06

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