IRC meeting summary for 2018-07-26

• View this week’s log on BotBot.me or MeetBot
• Meeting minutes by MeetBot

Topics discussed during this weekly meeting included the naming of an element in transactions spending segwit P2WSH outputs, the time of the weekly meeting, whether to create the final Git tag for the upcoming 0.16.2 Bitcoin Core release, and an issue with encoding text strings on Windows.

Naming of witness version of the P2SH redeemScript

Background: BIP16 P2SH provides a mechanism where you can receive a payment to the hash of a script. When you go to spend those bitcoins, you include the full script in the spend, where it’s called a redeemScript. BIP141 segwit P2WSH uses almost the same mechanism but calls it witnessScript in BIP141. Unfortunately, there are several similar terms for ultimately different things that sound similar.

Discussion (log): Matt Corallo requested the topic and introduced it: “We have to pick [a term] for BitcoinCore.org […] I know people who’ve called it the witness redeem script or so, which is also confusing because of P2SH-wrapped segwit, but witnessScript is confusing given [that the Bitcoin Core internal variable name] scriptWitness refers to the whole witness.”

Pieter Wuille suggested, “Perhaps it should be called P2WSH redeemScript, as it’s arguably specific to P2WSH (P2WPKH doesn’t have it, and future witness versions may not either).”

Conclusion: No explicit conclusion. Jonas Schnelli and Gregory Maxwell argued that the discussion wasn’t that important, and the topic was soon changed. BitcoinCore.org issue #581 is tracking the subject.

Meeting time

Background: as mentioned in the July 5th meeting, meeting participants were worried that possibly many Bitcoin Core contributors, particularly those in East Asia and Oceania, were unable to attend meetings because of timezone differences. A poll was conducted by Cory Fields to find optimal meeting times.

Discussion (log): Bryan Bishop requested an update on the topic, which was provided by Cory Fields: “[The] poll closed at the end of last week’s meeting. Winner: [the] current time. Poll results.”

The current scheduled time is Thursday 19:00 UTC. The second most favored time was one hour earlier. There was some quick discussion about whether the results were biased towards the people currently attending meetings, but it was noted that efforts were made to engage all active Bitcoin Core contributors, including those who lived in time zones where the current meeting occurs very early in morning.

Conclusion: no explicit conclusion. It did not seem like the meeting time is being changed at the moment.

0.16.2 final

Background: contributors have been working on a minor version release numbered 0.16.2 that contains backported bug fixes and minor features.

Discussion (log): Wladimir van der Laan opened the discussion, “Release Candidate (RC) 2 was tagged [about] a week ago. I don’t think any issues came up, so I think it’s time to tag final.”

Matt Corallo, Gregory Maxwell, Jonas Schnelli, Cory Fields, and João Barbossa supported the decision.

Conclusion: after the meeting, 0.16.2 was tagged.

Encoding issue on Windows

Background: the Windows Application Program Interface (API) has different requirements for strings of text than the Linux, MacOS, and *BSD APIs. As Pieter Wuille explained during the discussion, “[Windows] adopted unicode very early, [so] they picked a different encoding than what the rest of the world eventually ended up picking.” This currently creates problems when Bitcoin Core needs to open files that contain non-Latin characters in their file names or directory names.

Discussion (log): Chun Kuan Lee linked to PR #13426, requested the topic, and introduced it, “is it allowable to add [a] wmain function?” This would add a different main function to Bitcoin Core just for Windows users that could work around Windows-specific platform problems.

Wladimir van der Laan replied, “I’d prefer not. I think we had multiple entry points at some point, with [a] special one for Windows, but this was cleaned up to just main() […] I think #13426 is too big a change.”

Conclusion: After some discussion and quick web searches about what exactly Windows supports, several contributors said they should take a closer look at PR #13426 to possibly make concrete suggestions for improvement.

Minor topics

• High priority for review: instead of the usual list, reviewers are encouraged to focus on PRs and issues tagged for the upcoming Bitcoin Core release 0.17.

Humor

<gmaxwell>  i hate strings
  <wumpus>  so do I, but unfortunately they're needed for path names
 <cfields>  windows strings cause 2x developer hate :(
 <luke-jr>  they string us along?
 <cfields>  luke-jr: i would characterize it that way, yes

Participants

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. In particular, quotes taken from the discussion had their capitalization, punctuation, and spelling modified to produce consistent sentences. Bracketed words and fragments, as well as background narratives and exposition, were added by the author of this summary and may have accidentally changed the meaning of some sentences. If you believe any quote was taken out of context, please open an issue and we will correct the mistake.