Subject: Re: [bitcoindev] Time for an update to BIP2?

From: Murch <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 13 May 2024 14:33:57 -0400

Hey everyone,

I have spent some time going over comments about the BIP process in this 
thread and a few open pull requests in the BIPs repository. Thank you 
all for sharing your thoughts.

Below I summarized suggestions from those conversations. I started work 
on drafting a proposal to succeed BIP-2 and will consider all these 
suggestions with the intention of incorporating many of them.

If you are interested in collaborating on an updated Process BIP, I am 
open to one or two co-authors. I will also consider any further comments 
here on the mailing list, and look forward to the eventual review from 
any interested parties. I will start a first draft in my own BIPs 
repository after this email. Once the proposal is a bit more mature, I 
will open a pull request against the main BIPs repository.

These are my take-aways and open questions so far:

1. Process

What should the role of the editors be?

- The process should minimize judgment calls from editors
- Editors should focus on formal criteria and editorial qualities
- The audience rather than editors should evaluate technical soundness

What criteria distinguish Standards Track and Informational type BIPs?

- If deviation breaks compatibility, it should be "Standards Track"

Open questions:

- What changes to BIPs are acceptable at what stage of the process?
- Which changes need sign-off from the Champion?
- How can we make the process more robust in face of an absent Champion?

2. BIP Statuses

- Excessive count of statuses
- Meaning of statuses should be more clearly defined
- Criteria for status transitions should be clarified
- There have been multiple recommendations to reduce the statuses to:
DRAFT, PROPOSED, WITHDRAWN, with some disagreement on whether ACTIVE or 
FINAL would be useful in addition
- Get rid of the REJECTED status and drop the rule to move proposals to 
REJECTED due to time passing

Open questions:

- Is it a problem if a BIP is stuck in "DRAFT" or "PROPOSED" indefinitely?

3. Other format issues

- Comments and Comment Summary are largely being ignored, they do not 
seem to fulfill their intended purpose
- Backwards compatibility section is often forgotten
- Remove "Other Implementations" sections from documents
- Some suggested licenses may not be acceptable to license plain text

4. Scope of the Repository

- Only accept proposals that pass some bar of interest
- Require "a need for standardization", it must be relevant to multiple 
implementations or a broader audience
- Clarify purpose of repository; it is often misunderstand in how far 
BIPs "represent community consensus or recommendations"
- Focus on the proposals, explicitly stop guessing at acceptance and 
tracking of adoption

Open questions:

- Both a tightening and a broadening of the scope have been suggested:
Do BIPs need to be "related to the Bitcoin ecosystem", "related to 
technology that supports the bitcoin currency", or some other criterion?
- What does "keeping with the Bitcoin philosophy" mean?
- Where should adoption of BIPs be tracked? Should the BIPs repository 
offer an overview of BIP implementations separate from the author documents?

If you have input on open questions, or alternative suggestions to the 
summarized points, please let me know. As Tim before me, I would 
appreciate that you read BIP-2¹ carefully before replying.

¹ https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0002.mediawiki

Best,
Murch

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