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Date: Thu, 28 Jul 2011 11:37:21 -0400
From: Caleb James DeLisle <calebdelisle@lavabit.com>
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Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Seeking advice: Encouraging bug-fixing
 over new features
Precedence: list

Bitcoin seems to have a relatively unique problem, there is a perception that there are early adopters who still have large stashes of btc.
Not that this is wrong, they knew a good thing early, the problem is that it is hard for someone (me) to justify volunteering work on a codebase which will directly benefit other people even if they do nothing.
From my brief observation it appears that the developers now are split between early adopters who are working on their investment, ambitious people who are working on alt clients to satisfy certain requirements for their own projects and hobby developers donating code to alt chain clients because chains which have not taken off don't benefit anyone yet.
As far as trying to bring these people together, I don't have any silver bullet answers but I think there needs to be some kind of sponsorship of developers. I2P uses bounties but they are indeed a small community, I can see bounties going very wrong but I suppose it doesn't hurt to experiment. I think grants for active developers make more sense, then we only need someone to decide who is active enough.
Also moving in the direction of seperating bitcoin the program from Bitcoin the blockchain and accepting patches for merged mining and alt chain stuff which doesn't directly benefit Bitcoin would help decrease the "people are making money off of my back" feeling that (IMO) stands in the way of new developers.

Caleb


On 07/27/2011 08:15 PM, Jeff Garzik wrote:
> Linux kernel has not solved this problem; developers simply want to
> work on interesting stuff, rather than debug, I think.
> 
> The best Linus has done so far it making certain periods of time
> bugfix-only, refusing to take new feature pushes during the stability
> period.  If there are critical bugs, refusing to release the kernel
> until a developer fixes the regressions they added.
> 
> Linux is large enough, though, that the ecosystem has grown a support
> network, where companies pay for support (one big way my employer
> stays in business), which includes bug fixes.  So the paid support
> orgs, like Red Hat, wind up going a lot of grunt work fixing because
> they are the closest contact to actual users in the field encountering
> problems with the Wonderful New Features bestowed upon them by
> developers.
> 
> "drop and run" coding is a term for developers who appear, commit a
> new feature, and then disappear without addressing bug reports or
> other feedback regarding their contribution.
>