My story;
Even back in February I pushed Jeff for a mailinglist, and we got one (co-moderated by many). I have since been pushing people to use it for communicating about their plans for network changes. Protocol changes etc.
The problem is that Amaury refuses to use the list. When I confronted him he got angry and stated that discussions were not needed. What is equally worrying is that he directs all code changes to his private site instead of somewhere industry interested people might actually see it. As Justus Ranvier said, where is the specification?
@singularity I think the idea you post is nice, but I want it to be stronger. Less dependent on good-will. Because exactly that has been missing.
I also think the problem stems from the private communication with miners. The miners accept or reject changes, so you can see them like the voting part of the government (lower house or whatever its called in your country's democratic system). This was shortcutting the system..
What we saw was a decision for a hard fork with all the details ready made, agreed by miners and within 24 hours reported by a large number of professional sites, sealing the deal. This obviously was the result of massive private communication and coordination. It was well-planned with a timing that makes is hard to impossible to reverse.
On top of that, the ABC guys wrote a press release that clearly is intended to make it seem that they are the stewards and specification writers of BCH. No spec anywhere other than in their press release!
The problem I observe is not that one team didn't want to talk to other teams. The problem is that miners decided on a technical spec before that was made public.
As I said, there is likely a lot of overlap in your proposal with this thinking. Sorry for being very verbose.
I think the main goal is not so much that we make the developers sign something (though I'm fine signing your doc), its more that we need most miners to agree they will not sideline process like this again.
Adding to the proposal; we would benefit from a structure and a timeline (minimum time for review etc) where protocol changes are made public for not just miners but also developers to comment on it. Maybe a week for comments and another 3 days until the miners votes have to be in.
Naturally, after this stunt I have strong doubts that this will work. Miners and Amaury will just do the same thing and we are left standing with our d*k in our hands and software that is incompatible with what the miners are doing. But, he, got to try, right?
