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Re: Scheduled hard forks

 

Hi Igno,

A hard fork where everyone has a lot of time to upgrade is much less
painful than one in which the new client is available for only a short
time before the new rules go into effect.

So, it might be nice to also commit to a lower bound on the lead time
that users will have to upgrade and test before the new rules go into
effect.

So, to the list you gave I might add the following additional requirement:

• Before a hard fork, the final version of the new client will be
available for at least 3 months before the new rules go into effect.

If 3 months is too long, then maybe a beta should be available 3
months in advance, with the final version available at least 1 month
in advance.

And, for picking the 2 dates per year when the hard forks would occur,
the winter and summer solstices seem like good choices:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solstice

The betas would then be available on the equinox prior.

But, that's really only for reasons of style and marketing :–P

Best,
Casey

On Tue, Oct 3, 2017 at 1:29 PM, Ignotus Peverell
<igno.peverell@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> As we're preparing both a fully new blockchain format and implementation we,
> developers, are bound to make mistakes. Some of them will be trivial to
> correct, and some of them will not, requiring changes in consensus
> parameters. We will also want to "clean up" some technical debt that can
> accumulate in younger implementations. So I think it's fair to ask for some
> leeway to hard fork when required, at least at the beginning.
>
> To make that process easier and more predictable, I would like to include
> scheduled hard forks with the following limitations:
>
> Only 2 scheduled hard forks per year.
> Only for the first 2 years.
>
> The mechanism would be a mandated block version increase every 6 months,
> limited to 4 increases.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> - Igno
>
> P.S. Thanks to yeastplume for suggesting we establish a pre-defined
> schedule.
>
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