Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] About the small number of bitcoin nodes

From: Scott Howard <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 May 2014 10:02:22 -0400

On Mon, May 19, 2014 at 3:11 AM, Jeff Garzik <[email-masked]> wrote:
> On Sun, May 18, 2014 at 1:43 PM, Raúl Martínez <[email-masked]> wrote:
>> - bitcoind and Bitcoin Core should be in Linux repos:
>
> Agreed with conditions:
> 1) The distro MUST let bitcoin devs dictate which dependent libs are
> shipped with / built statically into the bitcoin binaries/libs.
> 2) The distro MUST permit fresh updates even to older stable distros.
> 2) The maintainer(s) MUST be active, and follow bitcoin development,
> release status, etc. on a near-daily basis, be able to respond quickly
> if security issues arise, etc.
>
> Matt C seems to do a good job of this in Ubuntu PPA, I'm told.

Update:

(1) and (3) are doable, however, Debian and Ubuntu policies make (2)
very difficult (with the exception of security patches). Micha Bailey
and I worked to get bitcoin removed from Debian and Ubuntu stable
releases because they would not allow (2). There are other mechanisms
that could accomplish (2) (backports, volatile, and updates
repositories), however they are not enabled by default and require
user intervention.

Debian unstable does allow (2) since there is no release, and there is
a package in Debian unstable. That package is blocked from
transitioning to a stable release. We've also blacklisted it from
Ubuntu so that Ubuntu doesn't just autoimport and release the Debian
unstable package in an Ubuntu stable release.

Micha is also working to have all old versions of bitcoin removed from
previous released Ubuntu versions.

Matt C's PPA is the best way of getting (1-3) above on Ubuntu, and the
Debian unstable package is probably the best way of getting (1-3)
above in Debian. Both require users to add a line to their apt sources
list; the Debian package would also require apt pinning.

Regards,
Scott