Author: alicexbt 2023-05-11 16:49:36
Published on: 2023-05-11T16:49:36+00:00
The decision to add new maintainers for Bitcoin has always been made by existing maintainers. The process is fundamentally more public now than it was previously, with public discussions on the merits of a person and nominations as topics during meetings. Over time, there's been more public participation in the PRs (pull requests) and on IRC (internet relay chat) meetings when maintainer nominations are brought up. We have nominations as topics during meetings now when they occur, and PRs to add keys are left open for longer to get more discussion. However, this process has not been without controversy, with some contributors expressing concern over the decision-making process. In May 2023, Michael Folkson expressed disappointment with the way the last pull request was merged, saying that we need a better process for adding maintainers. He also expressed concerns about the way maintainers were added, pointing out that Bitcoin's initial release in 2009 had only one developer and a few others experimenting with it, but now 99% of nodes use Bitcoin Core and five developers decide what's merged or not. This includes some trying to implement their ideas without a soft fork using mempool policies. Andrew Chow responded, acknowledging that they could have done a better job of communicating the decision to block Vasil Dimov as a new maintainer. According to Andrew, the decision process for adding a new maintainer has always been made by existing maintainers, who may have an open call for volunteers or suggest a specific person for maintainership. Contributors generally are not consulted in the decision to seek a new maintainer as they would not know whether there are things that are being overlooked or that there is maintainership load that needs to be distributed. Chow went on to explain how previous maintainer additions were made, stating that both Jonas Schnelli and Marco Falke were simply announced by Wladimir in 2015. After that, Meshcollider was added as a maintainer after a public "call for maintainers", and Fanquake was added during a CoreDev event in Amsterdam. For himself, Chow messaged Wladimir to volunteer for it after Meshcollider stepped down. Ultimately, if contributors disagree with how the project operates, they are free to leave and start their own fork that is run in a way that they think is appropriate. This is open source software, and no one is required to do anything. While there has been controversy over the decision-making process for adding new maintainers, there also seems to be more energy and momentum for collaboration and open communication on the Bitcoin project since discussions were had at CoreDev.
Updated on: 2023-06-16T17:34:17.693075+00:00