ACTION 23.1: Working Group to be formed to work on the All Core Devs Newsletter initiative. To be removed from the call 25 if there's no update. ACTION 23.2: Hudson to schedule the first EIP Improvement Process meeting. ACTION 23.3: ECH to consider what percentage amount to put into a DAI savings contract. Charles is going to write a proposal for that. ACTION 23.4: Hudson to confirm wording from Bitfly for ProgPoW refund blog post.
ACTION 24.1: Hudson James will put together a list of inactive cat herders to remove from the private chat. ACTION 24.2: Helena to review whether it is necessary to fund updating the ECH website or if it's trivial enough that no funding is needed.
Anett Since the last call there has been no change, but magicians are still looking for ways how we can collaborate together. Right now, there isn't much need of mixed collaboration, but we are definitely looking for opportunities to collaborate in the future. Thank you to everyone who helped and who attended the call on Wednesday.
Brett Anett, you put together a document in the last meeting, and we ran through the first part of it. There were quite a few things that were outstanding, or at least they were things we could have spoken about in the second part. Do you want to talk to that at all in this meeting?
Anett Sure. I can share the document. I think that there were so many things from the last call that were outstanding. They were about Istanbul hard fork and things that had already happened. And that's pretty much it. If there are some outstanding things, I will definitely them to to a PM for the next call, but right now I don't see anything changing from last time.
Tim So maybe one thing that could be worth pushing forward is the idea of fundraising. I know we discussed this at Devcon, and it came back up that we could do some joint fundraising for the Cat Herders and for Eith Magicians. It's something that's hard to do on these calls, but if a couple of people are interested in helping with fundraising efforts for the Cat Herders and Eith Magicians, it's something that could happen offline and be really valuable.
Anett We are definitely looking for ways how to work on fundraising. Jamie has been traveling so much lately so I haven't got much time to sync with him to talk about next steps, but Jamie started a thread about quadratic funding on the Magician's forum that I posted a link to in chat. I can also share some spreadsheets that cover this. Feel free to add any comments to those as well.
Brett The last time the cat herders did any fundraising was early this year. So we're probably coming around to the next round of the fundraising process in terms of going through Gitcoin and perhaps bounty and promoting that. I think it would probably be worth with having a sit down, so if we can have an action item to get together and brainstorm some ideas, and if anyone wants to collaborate, just drop a note in the Gitter channel and we'll take it from there.
Anett Speaker 2: Yeah, sure. I'm down for that, but I need someone to add me to the internal Gitter channel.
Brett I think we might create a fundraising group.
Anett I think that we actually have one on Telegram with Tim, Hudson, and Jamie and the people that attended the Devcon fundraising meeting. So I can add you guys if you've PM on Telegram.
Pooja I would love to be a part of that. I'm trying to help out with the fundraising. So probably I would like to have some input over there to brainstorm and how we can take it to the funders and create some kind of deck or something.
Tim The next agenda item is the hard fork coordination update, and we have our hard fork coordinator on the call. James, you want to give a quick update?
James It happened. I'd be interested in hearing thoughts from the group as far as how coordination went. I wasn't as active with Istanbul, and this is my first time being on the Cat Herders call, and part of what I'd like to understand is where you guys see this initiative in conjunction with the hard fork coordination process. Maybe that's a bigger update and should go on its own agenda item. Overall, the Istanbul hard fork is deployed, and I haven't heard anything other than that it's gone well.
Pooja The last update we had was that over 97% of the nodes are upgraded now, but it did not happen at the time of the fork. So it would be nice to have these big figures just before the fork. At the time, we were around 50% or less than that. So we can start coordinating a little early, and that would help to see these figures and have more nodes upgraded.
Brett Spot on, Pooja. We did have discussions around trying to coordinate to get in touch with the various stakeholders within the ecosystem. One of the things that we were very aware of was just the lateness in the number of people swapping over to the new client. That obviously was a concern running up into the fork. We would have liked to have started reaching out a little earlier. We've been trying to engage with the stakeholders and and find the best contacts for them.
A lot of the contacts that we had previously are no longer valid, or they've gone from being personal contacts to being more professional contacts as their organization has grown. So we've been trying to collect information around that. I guess working with yourselves and specifically James going forward, I think that process could improve a little more as we get into the next forks. We're very keen to oversee as the Cat Herders to try and promote these forks sooner rather than later with most people, so that we don't look like we're chasing our tails towards the end.
James Something I'd like to do moving forward is tighten the loop between communication channels as far as when something's decided and being able to get that information more quickly to the people that need to know it or want to know it.
Tim On that note, one super important thing is Muir Glacier is happening really soon. I know on the Cat Herders we already have a blog post drafted, but after the CoreDevs call on Friday, things should be pretty much set for the fork unless there's some major unexpected thing. We should try to push out the Cat Herders blog post on Friday right after the call and then start to reach out to stakeholders. Because it feels like the next upgrade is everything we've done so far, but on the hard mode.
Brett Absolutely. Agreed 100%.
Pooja Yeah, agreed. So I just shared the link of the draft to the Muir Glacier Cat Herder post that they are working on. Feel free to add anything to it. And there are some questions open that we might be getting more clarity on after this Friday call. I have added a section about the testnet update, and I'm not sure if we have any kind of information. I believe that Görli would not be doing this kind of update for testnet.
Tim The only testnet that does it is Ropsten. So it's probably worth stating explicitly that it's only a Ropsten that will fork.
Pooja Right. And we do we have any estimation of the date?
James We do. It's the first week of January.
Tim For Ropsten as well?
James For Ropsten I don't know.
Pooja That may be one thing we would want to know from the core developers.
Tim I can get that date for Ropsten. I'll ask my team.
Pooja So after the Friday meeting, if we get some further updates, we would add them over here, and it should be good to send it out. Because as early as we push it out, it would be easier to spread the word around.
James So all the contacts that we reached out to for Istanbul, is there a place we've collected that so we can do that again, or is that something we should be looking at doing?
Brett Absolutely. James. We've got a spreadsheet that we have within the Cat Herders that I can share with you, um, that has the most updated contact list that we're aware of. You might have better contacts, which would obviously help improve that list. We can share that with each other.
James Yes, please do.
Tim So the next agenda item was the EIP IP, the EIP improvement process. Hudson said he doesn't have much of an update. Does anyone else have anything they want to share on this?
Brent Not sure if this is the right time to mention it, but I've started to contact some of the older EIP owners. For example, I contacted the owner of EIP 3, Martin Holst Swende, and he says he thinks that should be abandoned. I'm going to put out a post to the EIP Gitter threads asking if anyone else does not want this to be moved to Abandoned. I'm pushing towards stuff like that. So that'll be one down and a couple of hundred more to go.
Tim That's pretty cool. I think you can probably almost submit a PR to it directly, and if people have an objection they can object on the PR. You're going to need Martin's plus one on the PR to close it, but you might speed up the process if, once you get the EIP champion's thumbs up, just submit a PR to change it.
Brent Yep. That was my next question as to what the process is, and you just answered that question, so thank you.
Tim Yeah. I'm not sure what the exact term is, but I would just submit a one-line PR, changed the status on the EIP's Gotter, and if people have an objection they can object on the PR directly, and they can always rechange the status. If somebody really cares about EIP 3, they can champion it or create a new one.
Brent And I plan on monitoring that stuff so we can keep track of it.
James From discussions before with the EIP editors, anything older than six months that hasn't had anything happen to it is considered fair to be inactive. That's something we worked on doing nine months ago, but then didn't have any movement on actually making that happen.
Brent The next two are 86 and 101. Both are Vitalik's, so I'm going to send a message to him. 86 is abstraction of transaction origin and signature, and the other one is serenity currency and crypto abstraction. Does anyone know anything about those two? Would those fall in the "ready-to-be-abandoned" category since they're so old?
James Can you send me those? I want to really look at them before I respond, but I can help with that.
Brent Here's the link with of all of them, and they're the top three, and the second and third EIPS in that list there. If you could review those and then let me know if there's any information that says I shouldn't contact Vitalik and ask him if he wants to abandon those, let me know for sure.
I know Charles had been spearheading this. He's not on the call. Does anybody else have an update on this?
Brett No, not that, other than the sooner the better.
Tim Cool. I'll follow up with Charles so he can create the initial transaction. We'll probably do this in two steps and not convert everything in one shot, because the UX for the multisig is pretty bad. So if we can get it right once, then it's easier to do it right the second time. So I can follow up with him on that, and we can have a Zoom call where he walks me through it.
Tim I think I pinged Lane on this. He said he would create a multisig transaction. He didn't, so I'll give him another ping.
The champion wanted for EIP 689 - I feel like we can probably close this. James, you commented that you said this is actually already implemented.
James Yes. I think I may actually have done this in March or something. The back discussion for this is the OEG was very much a yellow paper person, and certain things were updated in a way that it wasn't all also updated also in the yellow paper, and that all needed to be in resolution. But this has actually been implemented as far as I remember correctly.
Tim Cool. So I'll close this. People are free to reopen it if they feel strongly that this wasn't the right thing.
So we have two other ones, the impact of uncle rates on JIT. This seems like a technical thing from the CoreDevs meeting in Berlin from EIP 615, which was abandoned. I would probably close this. It doesn't seem like there's a clear action.
James Yeah, I would close that, too. Any movement on 615 is going to be broken into smaller parts and possibly spearheaded by ETC, so it won't come in this form anyway.
Tim Okay, cool. Then there's this other one around documenting the Cat Herders process, which is the PR and the last issue. Luke said he was still interested in doing this, but he was short on time right now. So I think we can leave it open on this. So we're down to two issues, which is not too bad.
Tim Next thing was removing inactive people from the private chat. We probably should do that. Does anyone disagree?
Brett I think we agreed. Hudson was just gonna put together a list, which I don't believe he's done yet.
Tim Okay. So let's have an action item for Hudson to do the list.
Tim There's no link, and I saw this evolved from a PR. It's a Dropbox paper document now. Does anyone have an update on that? I haven't been following it super closely.
Brett Unfortunately, Charles and William are not on the call, so there's no information on that.
Tim Okay. So let's leave that there.
Brett We were going to talk about the potential of putting this out to market, having a bounty to manage when the ECH website need to be updated and what should be paid and so on. The reality in terms of payments depends on how much work needs to be done. If it's simply changing the hard fork from Istanbul to Muir Glacier or Muir Glacier to Berlin, I suspect there's not a lot to be paid, if anything. One of us could probably do it.
Hels Do we know who's got access to it at the moment? Because at the moment it looks like it just needs the hard fork update.
Brett Yeah, correct. Hugo was the last person to update it, along with Charles, I know Hugo is unable to help the Cat Herders at present, because his day job is ramping up a bit. I can reach out to him, um, and just get some help to update it.
Hels Yeah. Or if we can get the login or something so we can update it.
Brett Absolutely.
Tim
Speaker 1: Okay. And then we had a whole lot of action items. I'll go over them.
No update. Left for the next call, but then if there are still no updates, remove it from the next call.
Ethereum Cat Herders to start communication for the Istanbul Hardfork with relevant stakeholders from November 27, 2019.
We did that.
He hasn't done it, so we can leave it there.
I think Hudson did that. I'm not sure. Maybe we can just ask him.
Charles was going to write the proposal up for that. So let's leave those two there.
ECH to review Issue 66 so as to decide if it should be closed.
We just closed it.
Hudson to create a proposal to remove individuals from the ECH gitter/telegram channel that have not been active in the last 6 months.
We're still waiting on that.
That's done. James is on this call.
ECH to review the community page and provide feedback for the Ethereum.org team.
We should probably leave that there because there's still a lot of discussion going on that page.
We just discussed that.
Helena, after you look at the website, you can let us know it's trivial enough that no funding is needed or if it's actually quite big and we should consider bounties.
ECH multisig holders to finalise the payments in the funding issues page.
We did all the payments.
We did that already.
I don't think he's done that so we can leave it there.
I've done that. I haven't heard back from ETC yet about the workshop.
Tim Is there anything else anyone wants to discuss?
Pooja I remember a document you shared sometimes back about the payments that you are doing for ProgPoW. We were thinking of sharing that. Do you think it is the right time?
Tim I'm not sure we want this to share this publicly, because it has everybody's info and their addresses. Not that none of this information is public. I got it all from the ProgPoW audit page, but I feel a bit icky sharing each person and how much we sent them. But we have a blog post.
Pooja Yeah, I'm talking about the blog post now, not this document.
Tim Yeah, in the blog post, Hudson just wanted to get the confirmation about the wording from like the EF and the big companies involved. Here's the draft of the blog post. So we're basically just waiting on Hudson to ping those organizations and make sure that they're okay with the way it's worded.
Atlantic Crypto and the EF just like left their funds with the Cat Herders, which was really nice. And it led to Keep Crypto Healthy refunding the individuals who contributed to the audit, but then BitFly is going to be donating to Gitcoin grants with their refund. So it was kind of awkward to try and phrase all of this and have it be coherent. So we just want to make sure that they're all okay with how it's worded. It's mostly just BitFly that we need to confirm that they're okay with the wording, because they had the weirdest situation with their refund, and we just want to make sure that they're happy with how we've explained things.
Pooja One more thing I wanted to share here. It was discussed in DevCon to keep rotating on sharing information. So Charles opted to write the newsletter. So I wanted to check if anybody else is interested in sharing the ECH update for next week or maybe any other week. So they can let me know, and we can take turns if they would want to.
Tim I would be happy to help, but I'd need to know in advance. Like, I probably couldn't pick up next week, but if we had like a spreadsheet or something, and I knew a couple of weeks in advance that I'm doing it, I would be happy to take one from, from time to time.
Hels Yeah. I'm happy to help as well, Pooja.
Pooja Okay. I'm going to create a spreadsheet. If anyone esle is interested, please let me know and I'll add them to the spreadsheet.
Tim Cool. Thanks everybody. This was a really good call. hanks Tim. will be happen next call literally falls on Christmas Eve. So let's do it on January 7th instead.
- Anett Rolikova
- Brent Allsop
- Brett Robertson
- Hels
- James Hancock
- Jim Bennett
- Pooja Ranjan
- Tim Beiko