Author: Gregory Maxwell 2013-07-24 03:19:31
Published on: 2013-07-24T03:19:31+00:00
In an email conversation from 2013, the topic of how Bitcoin is different from other software was discussed. The concern was that the package maintainers might perceive the version of the letter as high-handed, and not notice the actual facts included in the letter explaining why Bitcoin is different than a lot of software. The intention of the letter was to address concerns about how upstreams frequently cry at the mutilation of their unique and precious snowflake. The second paragraph acknowledged the many good motivations for the existing norms and the third paragraph talked about consensus systems to show that they weren't totally clueless and pointing out that there is an actually unusual situation. The initial approach of "please don't package this at all" was compromised to "please understand first". This was done in part because of the protest of the Gentoo package maintainer, who also bundles leveldb but hard locks it to an exact version in the package system with exact build flags, which is a sophisticated compromise that might not generalize to other distributors. As a first step, it's important to know that there is a concern here shared by a bunch of people. Helping talk people through understanding it is part of the job. There is naturally some tension when people with different priorities and backgrounds interact. The result is usually better for everyone when upstreams run into disagreements with packagers. The discussion was aimed at avoiding gratuitously offending people. They were trying to find specific tweaks that would reduce initial bristling.
Updated on: 2023-05-19T17:12:07.966896+00:00