On Thu, Nov 8, 2012 at 10:19 AM, Mike Hearn <mike@plan99.net> wrote:

I won't be able to make it this time. My feeling is IRC is a good place to bounce ideas around when time and people happen to be available, but having meetings there will inevitably lead to decision making that's better done in a slower manner via email.

Well I think regularly scheduled IRC meetings are a good idea, as for some smaller decisions quick brainstorming tends to work better than long e-mail threads.

But indeed big and important decisions should be posted on the mailing list too.

Comments:

BIP process: are we happy with how it is working? What can we do to improve it?

Needing some kind of process to allocate a number is over the top. I skipped this for the bloom filtering BIP. We should take off the part of the {{BIP}} template that says "don't just pick a number and add a bip" - that's exactly what people should do. I'm not sure there's any need for an editing role either.

Agreed in that we don't need a "number allocation king". But some rules for the numbering can be good to keep sanity. What about very simply "everyone that wants to create a BIP picks the next available number and reserves that page on the Wiki?".

Is it time to feature-freeze 0.8

I'd like more time to get the bloom filtering work in. It'll be easier to promote the 0.8 release if we can sell it as "important scalability/performance improvement for the network, upgrade to help Bitcoin keep growing", as whilst there's no real auto update or organized people who religiously update promotion is very important. I think ultraprune + bloom filtering is the two major scalability improvements we have right now.

I'm not sure about a full feature freeze. I agree it could be wise not do any more changes of the scale of ultraprune before 0.9, to give some stability to fix the kinks in the current version.

Wladimir