spesmilo
Name and direction
I want to open a discussion about the name of this project and the direction it is taking.
I guess we are all aware of the history. It looks this fork is taking quite a distinct path from the original work done by Neil. I am hoping it will be more active and flourish. However, the fact that it's still called Electrumx might confuse people (both ways).
Wouldn't it be better if we renamed it to something else and clearly cut it from it's heritage? Something like happened with OpenOffice/LibreOffice, MySQL/MariaDB etc. I am really bad at creative, so I don't have any clever suggestions, but I am sure we can come up with something better than ElectrumY, which is the only thing that came up to me :)
Also, I think it would be better to clearly decide on altcoin support. I, for one, do not care about anything other than Bitcoin, but I also understand that there are people who do. If altcoins are internal to the code, they should be supported and maintained. If the team is not ready to support them, they should be removed. A middle ground could be, that the coin support is somehow modularized and removed from the repo itself, with people able to build and support their own modules, which could be installed externally during the setup process.
At this point, I'd also like to thank all the contributors of this project, you are doing awesome job. And I think we also need to acknowledge the tremendous work Neil has done, as the original author, even though we might not agree with the way he has handled the project in the last few months.
At this point there is no evidence that a new name is needed. Most users of ElectrumX use it for Bitcoin, and they use that name in association with Bitcoin. Thus, changing the name would confuse a majority of users. I believe that keeping the name is also a way to acknowledge the role of @kyuupichan
However, that decision is temporary; we might indeed have to rename the project. My position is that we do not have to do that for the moment, so it is better to wait.
Regarding altcoin support: I think that making altcoin support through modules (or config files) could negatively impact us, because it would make our code more complex. I prefer a situation where altcoins maintain their own fork of the project, and where "modularity" means that their code can be rebased easily.
Note that if we want to release on PyPI (pip), we need a name for that.
As for altcoins, I am still neutral on that. They are already in the repo, already abstracted away, each with at least a (basic) unit test. In my view, until they are in the way for meaningful changes, we might as well keep them. I don't personally care about altcoins either, the question is whether by having them we attract any contributors who make changes useful for us too.
Note that if we want to release on PyPI (pip), we need a name for that.
This was one my main reasons why I brought it up. Given that Python uses a global repository of modules in a lot of cases, conflicts might rise as the versions will inevitably start diverging.
Please keep altcoin support, many projects need that. I am running electrums for AtomicDEX, for dozens of coins and having to deal with dozens of different electrumx server sources would make my work a lot more complicated.
I believe altcoin support adds unneeded complexity and waste maintenance resources and they should be removed.
A lot about electrumX is the way it is in order to be coin agnostic. I don't care about alts but I see how electrumx is as relevant as it is because all the alt devs care about the project and all the multi-coin-wallet devs rely on it for their backend. Therefore, personally I would not support an effort to strip alts from the project but on the other hand I would not support making any concessions to add more alts, neither. No API changes to accommodate alt-coins.
To add to this, i've been maintaining my own fork of electrumx/electrum designed for alts. (electrumx has no major changes) but the electrum has had an overhaul for altcoin support. i'd be happy to accept any PR's made here for alt's over in https://github.com/electrum-altcoin/electrumx
