From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from sog-mx-1.v43.ch3.sourceforge.com ([172.29.43.191] helo=mx.sourceforge.net) by sfs-ml-3.v29.ch3.sourceforge.com with esmtp (Exim 4.76) (envelope-from ) id 1VZEx1-0008Rr-CD for bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net; Thu, 24 Oct 2013 07:03:23 +0000 X-ACL-Warn: Received: from chrocht.moloch.sk ([62.176.169.44] helo=mail.moloch.sk) by sog-mx-1.v43.ch3.sourceforge.com with esmtps (TLSv1:AES256-SHA:256) (Exim 4.76) id 1VZEx0-00049U-15 for bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net; Thu, 24 Oct 2013 07:03:23 +0000 Received: from [192.168.0.102] (ip66.bbxnet.sk [91.219.133.66]) by mail.moloch.sk (Postfix) with ESMTPSA id E78C318057B8; Thu, 24 Oct 2013 09:03:14 +0200 (CEST) Message-ID: <5268C632.3030005@250bpm.com> Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2013 09:03:14 +0200 From: Martin Sustrik User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/24.0 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Pieter Wuille , Peter Todd References: <791a727f-2188-4848-bd77-ea733c8c5c2c@me.com> <201310211947.59640.luke@dashjr.org> <52661DB7.7040805@250bpm.com> <52662AA1.5050509@250bpm.com> <52677CF7.9070609@250bpm.com> <20131023194039.GB31497@petertodd.org> <52682C24.30700@250bpm.com> <20131023202731.GA31783@petertodd.org> In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Spam-Score: 0.0 (/) X-Spam-Report: Spam Filtering performed by mx.sourceforge.net. See http://spamassassin.org/tag/ for more details. X-Headers-End: 1VZEx0-00049U-15 Cc: Bitcoin Development Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Revisiting the BIPS process, a proposal X-BeenThere: bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.9 Precedence: list List-Id: List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2013 07:03:23 -0000 On 23/10/13 23:07, Pieter Wuille wrote: > In short, > consistency is more important than correctness. That's a nice and concise way to put it and any potential protocol documentation should start with a statement like that. > However, I do not think that making it hard to find information about > the details of the system is the way to go. Alternate implementations > are likely inevitable, and in the long run probably a win for the > ecosystem. If effort is put into accurately describing the rules, it > should indeed carry a strong notice about it being descriptive rather > than normative. One interesting question is whather alternative implementations are more likely to get it wrong because the protocol description is wrong or because the authors misunderstood the reference implementation source code. Extensive documentation of the source code, a la Knuth's literate programming, may be some kind of a middle ground. > If someone is willing to work on that, I am (and likely many people in > #bitcoin-dev are) available for any questions about the protocol and > its semantics. Ok. Several people expressed an interest in the topic, so I'll give it a try and see how it fares. Martin