IRC meeting summary for 2017-02-09

Overview


Main topics

  • 0.14 RC1 release

0.14 RC1 release

background

Bitcoin Core 0.14 is scheduled to be released around March 2017. Open pull request aimed for 0.14 are tagged with a 0.14 tag.

RC1 was aimed to be released on 2017-02-06.

meeting comments

There are some network related issues delaying the RC1 release. The open PRs with fixes are #9698 (fix socket close race), #9715 (Disconnect peers which we do not receive VERACKs from within 60 sec), #9720 (fix banning and disallow sending messages before receiving verack) and #9708 (Clean Up all known races/platform-specific UB). The latter is not strictly necessary, but makes it much easier to test the others. By addressing all known races in the net code, even the harmless ones, it allows us to start using CI tools to avoid introducing new ones.

Sipa noticed the static seed IP list isn’t updated for 0.14, which is something usually done before every major release.

There’s currently no mention in release-process.md of updating chainTxData (used for progress estimation) with more accurate transaction count estimations. These constants where updated in the recent #9472 (Disentangle progress estimation from checkpoints) which are still accurate for 0.14. Sipa will write a script to compute the new chainTxData constant for future releases.

Issue #9392 (Wallet ancestor sanity-check ignores sigops) is still tagged for 0.14, but not a high priority. All other issues have open PRs for it.

Achow101 has added lots of stuff to the release notes and there’s now only 2 things that need to be checked off.

The release notes currently have a recommendation to run Bitcoin Knots for miners wishing to retain “priority” sorting for mining. It doesn’t make much sense to recommend other forks that haven’t been reviewed by the developers of this project. Gmaxwell thinks it’s fine to recommend a compatible fork for a feature we don’t care to support, however he does think we shouldn’t recommend the use of priority.

meeting conclusion

  • Update the static seed IP list
  • Update release-process.md to include chainTxData bump
  • Untag issue #9392 for 0.14
  • Complete the release notes
  • Remove the Bitcoin Knots recommendation from the release notes

Comic relief

wumpus           if it's manual work, it's probably going to be skipped for most minor releases
wumpus           heck, we forget to update the version numbers half the time :-)

jtimon           maybe just a question in a faq or something? "we don't recommend using prioirty, but if you miss it, there's knots at..."
gmaxwell         jtimon: infrequently asked questions
gmaxwell         never asked questions

Participants

IRC nick Name/Nym
sipa Pieter Wuille
jonasschnelli Jonas Schnelli
cfields Cory Fields
wumpus Wladimir van der Laan
jtimon Jorge Timón
MarcoFalke Marco Falke
achow101 Andrew Chow
gmaxwell Gregory Maxwell
sdaftuar Suhas Daftuar

Disclaimer

This summary was compiled without input from any of the participants in the discussion, so any errors are the fault of the summary author and not the discussion participants.