Author: Andrew Chow 2023-04-19 21:33:33
Published on: 2023-04-19T21:33:33+00:00
The communication challenges faced by the Bitcoin Core project have been discussed in an email by Michael Folkson. He notes that maintainers merge pull requests without providing commentary on why they have done so. Maintainers also leave pull requests with many ACKs and few NACKs for months without explaining why they haven't merged them. There are currently 320 open PRs and 366 open issues, making it impossible to keep up with everything that goes on throughout the repo. The maintainers' judgement call is made as to whether something has been sufficiently reviewed, and part of this involves considering the quality and competence of the reviewers. Lastly, anyone who thinks that maintainers only look at the numbers of (N)ACKs is delusional, as there is a lot more nuance to determining even just the status of opinions on a PR.Regarding a specific example of a soft fork attempt, many casual observers inflated the numbers on the utxos.org site signalling support. However, maintainers do not only look at the numbers of (N)ACKs and consider opinions outside of the repository itself, such as on this mailing list and elsewhere that people discuss soft forks.Finally, Andrew Chow notes that those involved in the project are not obligated to implement anything. A feature request not being implemented may be because the people who do open PRs are either not interested in implementing the feature or are working on other things they believe to be higher priority. Additionally, a feature may seem like a good idea, but there are often interactions with other things that may end up resulting in it being rejected or needing significant revision, especially for something which affects transaction relay.
Updated on: 2023-06-16T17:32:07.288762+00:00