Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Change to multiple executables?

From: John Smith <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 10 Aug 2011 17:45:42 +0000

On Wed, Aug 10, 2011 at 4:49 PM, Gavin Andresen <[email-masked]>wrote:

> RE: splitting off the "send commands to a running bitcoin" :
>
> I'm mildly against it. It would be less confusing for newbies, at the
> cost of forcing everybody who has already written backup scripts or
> other interact-with-running-bitcoin tools to tweak their code. The
> coding will be easy, but do you really want to spend the time to
> answer all the "I installed Bitcoin X.Y and now my backup script
> doesn't work" questions and modify the wiki pages and ...
>

As the project is still in "experimental" phase I suppose people can expect
changes like this? And the change is pretty much trivial, and it makes sense
for a future direction (UI<->Wallet in separate processes for security
concerns).

To be honest I feel a bit like every change that I (and I've also heard this
from others) propose is shot down, no matter how well formulated.  This is
actively discouraging developers from joining this project.

Of course it makes sense to be a careful, but the project is not on life
support is it? Satoshi did a great job making the program, but his work was
not perfect, and it makes sense to look ahead a bit.

I think it would be better to switch to two branches, like most other open
source projects I've worked with:

0.3.x -> small, compatible changes, bugfixes, like now
0.4.x -> trunk, more impactful changes, refactorings, eventual major release

Both will obviously be fully compatible on the P2P-level.

> I'd rather that time be spent working on any remaining build issues so
> we can switch to bitcoin-qt.  I don't care if it is autotools or qmake
> or QT creator, I just care that it works on Windows and Linux under
> gitian and has clear instructions so I can build it on my Mac.
>

I could do the Gitian stuff but not the Mac instructions, as I don't have a
Mac...

JS