Bitcoin Core maintainers and communication on merge decisions

Summary:

In a bitcoin-dev discussion, users have expressed the need for better communication and a well-written spec to be effective while working on decentralized projects. They also suggest that more anonymous or pseudonymous maintainers should be added, and Github should be replaced with something P2P like https://radicle.xyz/. The discussion also involves a critique of the way new maintainers are added, stating that it is done by existing maintainers and contributors are generally not consulted.However, the process has become more public over time, with more open discussions about maintainership. On the issue of blocking Vasil Dimov as a new maintainer, there were concerns brought up by other contributors that contributed to the decision to ultimately NACK his nomination. It was suggested that maintainers inherently look at what everyone else has looked at before merging and should give it a final once-over before merging. Andrew Chow suggests that the idea of adding ryanofsky as a maintainer has been floated around before.The Bitcoin development community has taken a positive step towards public discussion again. However, concerns still remain regarding maintainers and merge decisions. A recent group-wide effort to move towards public discussion was held at CoreDev, with many citing negative behavior as a primary reason for avoiding public discussion. This behavior includes dragging project meta discussions onto public forums such as the mailing list and Twitter, which invites abuse towards maintainers and contributors.This abuse in turn leads to private discussions, as people feel like they are being "sealioned" by certain individuals who post publicly. Despite these issues, the Bitcoin-dev mailing list remains active for community discussion. Finally, the discussion ends on a positive note, stating that there seems to be more energy and momentum for collaboration and open communication on the project.

Updated on: 2023-06-16T17:39:00.567843+00:00