Author: Michael Folkson 2023-04-20 08:45:58
Published on: 2023-04-20T08:45:58+00:00
The communication challenges faced by the Bitcoin Core project have been highlighted by Michael Folkson in an email to Andrew Chow. The project has a black box approach whereby maintainers merge pull requests with no commentary on why they've done so. Additionally, there are often long delays for PRs that have many ACKs and few NACKs. With 320 open PRs and 366 open issues currently, things can easily fall through the cracks. Maintainers make judgement calls based on their own knowledge of contributors and the codebase when deciding if something is ready to be merged. However, maintainers aren't necessarily the ones who block a merge, and often require more or specific additional people to review a PR before merging it. The need for more and higher quality public communication has been emphasized, as well as the need for additional maintainers. Requiring maintainers to write explanations for every single merge would simply increase the burden on them and increase the rate of burnout and resignations. The shortage of maintainers has already resulted in too many stepping down. The potential maintainer Vasil, who made significant contributions over a number of years, was blocked from becoming a maintainer despite being ACKed by current maintainers and long term contributors. A feature request not being implemented is because maintainers and contributors are either not interested in implementing it, or are working on other things that they believe to be a higher priority. It is up to individuals to implement features they want or pay someone to do it for them. There are often interactions with other things that may result in a feature being rejected or needing significant revision, especially for something which affects transaction relay.
Updated on: 2023-06-16T17:30:20.175535+00:00