Author: Mike Hearn 2011-08-11 12:11:29
Published on: 2011-08-11T12:11:29+00:00
Open source maintainers often say "no" more than they say "yes". Ideas that receive responses like "maybe", "yes but later", "no unless you convince me", or "perhaps in a different way" are not being shot down, but are requests for more work to be done. It is important not to get emotional about open source contributions. Project maintainers cannot and do not say yes to every patch or idea proposed. The context discusses several ideas suggested by Gavin Andresen which have been rejected by the main developers. One of these ideas was to add extra bits in the service field of the version message to allow nodes to indicate if they are mining, willing to be seed nodes, relay transactions, or want relayed transactions.Another suggestion was to use getblocks in reverse chronological order so clients can start up quicker while downloading blocks in the background. However, this won't help startup time because blocks need to be connected together in sequence. A way of requesting block bodies without headers was also suggested, but the cost/benefit ratio of this idea isn't clear. Additionally, it was suggested to have sequence numbers as part of TxIn instead of the whole transaction. This idea was shot down since seqnums are already part of the tx inputs and need to be that way for contracts.While some of the proposals address problems that need to be solved, it's not clear whether these suggestions are the right way to solve them. Other suggestions reflect either a lack of understanding of the system or ignorance of backwards compatibility. Overall, it is normal for project maintainers to reject ideas, and proposals should not be taken personally.
Updated on: 2023-05-26T20:13:01.879774+00:00