Communication has been a challenge on Bitcoin Core for what I can tell the
entire history of the project. Maintainers merge a pull request and provide no
commentary on why they’ve merged it. Maintainers leave a pull request with many
ACKs and few (if any) NACKs for months and provide no commentary on why they
haven't merged it. I can only speculate on why and it probably depends on the
individual maintainer. Sometimes it will be poor communication skills,
sometimes it will be a desire to avoid accountability, sometimes it will be
fear of unreasonable and spiteful legal action if they mistakenly merge a pull
request that ends up containing a bug. But search through the pull requests on
Bitcoin Core and you will rarely see a rationale for a merge decision. The
difference between say previous maintainers like Wladimir and some of the
current maintainers is that previous maintainers were extremely responsive on
IRC. If you disagreed with a merge decision or thought it had been merged
prematurely they would be happy to discuss it on IRC. In present times at least
a subset of the current maintainers are not responsive on IRC and will refuse
to discuss a merge decision. One farcical recent example [0] was the pull
request to add Vasil Dimov as a maintainer where despite many ACKs from other
maintainers and other long term contributors two maintainers (fanquake and
Gloria) refused to discuss it on the pull request or on IRC. It took almost 5
months for Gloria to comment on the pull request despite many requests from me
on the PR and on IRC. I even requested that they attend the weekly Core Dev IRC
meeting to discuss it which they didn’t attend.
A pull request to add a maintainer isn’t a normal pull request. Generally pull
requests contain a lot more lines of code than a single line adding a trusted
key. Not merging a pull request for a long period of time can be extremely
frustrating for a pull request author especially when maintainers and long term
contributors don’t comment on the pull request and the pull request is stuck in
“rebase hell”. Clearly it is the lesser evil when compared to merging a harmful
or bug ridden pull request but poor non-existent communication is not the only
way to prevent this. Indeed it creates as many problems as it solves.
Another farcical recent(ish) example was the CTV pull request [1] that
ultimately led to a contentious soft fork activation attempt that was called
off at the last minute. If you look at the comments on the pull request there
were 3 individuals (including myself) who NACKed the pull request and I think
it is fair to say that none of us would be considered long term contributors to
Bitcoin Core. I have criticised Jeremy Rubin multiple times for continuing to
pursue a soft fork activation attempt when it was clear it was contentious [3]
but if you look at the pull request comments it certainly isn’t clear it was.
Maintainers and long term contributors (if they commented at all) were gently
enthusiastic (Concept ACKing etc) without ACKing that it was ready to merge. A
long term observer of the Core repo would have known that it wasn’t ready to
merge or ready to attempt to activate (especially given it was a consensus
change) but a casual observer would have only seen Concept ACKs and ACKs with 3
stray NACKs. Many of these casual observers inflated the numbers on the
utxos.org site [4] signalling support for a soft fork activation attempt.
I set out originally to write about the controls and processes around merges on
the default signet (bitcoin-inquisition [5]) but it quickly became obvious to
me that if communication around Core merges/non-merges is this weak you can
hardly expect it to be any better on bitcoin-inquisition/default signet where
there is no real monetary value at stake. I will probably write about
bitcoin-inquisition/default signet in a future email as I do think the
perception that it is “the one and only” staging ground for consensus changes
is dangerous [6] if the maintainer(s) on that project have the same
inclinations as a subset of the Core maintainers.
As I stated at the beginning there is an element to this which is not
individual(s) specific and an adverse reaction to outright malicious actors
external to any of these projects. I do not think any of the current
maintainers on Core or bitcoin-inquisition are outright malicious even if a
subset of them consistently frustrate me with their lack of transparency and
accountability. But this issue isn't going away and I'm sure we'll hear more on
this from others in the coming months. To me it is a straight choice of taking
transparency and accountability much more seriously or failing that investing
more heavily (time and resources) in consensus compatible forks of Core and
treating Core like it is a proprietary "open source" project where merge
decisions are not explained or justified in the open.
[0]: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/25871
[1]: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/21702
[2]:
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2022-April/020386.html
[3]: https://gist.github.com/michaelfolkson/352a503f4f9fc5de89af528d86a1b718
[4]: https://utxos.org/signals/
[5]:
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2022-September/020921.html
[6]:
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2022-September/020948.html
--
Michael Folkson
Email: michaelfolkson at [protonmail.com](http://protonmail.com/)
Keybase: michaelfolkson
PGP: 43ED C999 9F85 1D40 EAF4 9835 92D6 0159 214C FEE3
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