Process: Activate BIP3

[murchandamus]

This is a first draft of applying the changes prescribed by BIP 3 in the section Updates to Existing BIPs should this BIP be Activated.

It also updates the CI-scripts to align with the new formatting.

Waiting for:

• @real-or-random’s proposal to update the Licensing scheme

Planned for follow-up or parallel PRs:

• Evaluate Informational BIPs regarding update to Specification type
• BIPs that have had Draft status for extended periods will be moved to Complete or Deployed as applicable in collaboration with their authors.
• The authors of incomplete Draft BIPs will be contacted to learn whether the BIPs are still in progress toward Complete, and will otherwise be updated to Closed as described in the Workflow section above.
• Make changes or remove non-existent BIPs 40, 41, and 63 (breaks CI)
• Enforce order of headers in Preamble and fix order in BIPs that don’t conform

[murchandamus]

I have updated the scripts/buildtable.pl in lock step with each of the changes so that the build script passes for every commit. The remaining tasks should probably be handled in follow-ups as they will take a variable amount of time.

[murchandamus]

Rebased on the latest version of #1819.

[murchandamus]

I can’t reproduce the scripts/diffcheck.sh error locally either with the latest commit of this branch, by bisecting, or after merging the latest upstream/master.
I’m thinking that the next step is to improve the script with a more helpful error message, but I’m not going to pursue that today.

[ajtowns]

You can reproduce the error message and get more info with:

$ git checkout 187d8859dce80c8433ff7466d012b5dd78ac3136   # master's parent commit (to avoid the conflict)
$ git merge 5e776c4c92d0a33c15311c7289139835132f2fec      # this PR
$ scripts/diffcheck.sh
...
$ diff -u -B5 /tmp/before.diff /tmp/after.diff
...

It's complaining that there are differences in the summaries of BIPs 40 ("Stratum wire protocol"), 41 ("Stratum mining protocol"), and 63 ("Stealth addresses"); which are all changing from "Standard" to "Specification", but only exist as assigned numbers, with no actual document in the repo. They're all more than a decade old based on git blame's output, so could probably just be removed from the README entirely (though doing that would also trigger the same set of errors).

[ajtowns]

I wonder if it would be worthwhile splitting the list of BIPs in the README by status. I've had a go at that in a gist here, including an update for the perl script: https://gist.github.com/ajtowns/5a8c504b6ef0e91437614be2840921d7#file-test-mediawiki (also changed the link text to be BIP-nnn instead of just nnn, to make searching for "bip-3" easier)

[murchandamus]

It's complaining that there are differences in the summaries of BIPs 40 ("Stratum wire protocol"), 41 ("Stratum mining protocol"), and 63 ("Stealth addresses");

Thanks for figuring that out. I was starting to doubt my sanity that evening. :)

They're all more than a decade old based on git blame's output, so could probably just be removed from the README entirely (though doing that would also trigger the same set of errors).

I guess I should remove or relabel them in a separate PR, then.

I wonder if it would be worthwhile splitting the list of BIPs in the README by status. I've had a go at that in a gist here, including an update for the perl script: https://gist.github.com/ajtowns/5a8c504b6ef0e91437614be2840921d7#file-test-mediawiki (also changed the link text to be BIP-nnn instead of just nnn, to make searching for "bip-3" easier)

I like the change to "BIP-nnn"; it looks nice. And sorting by status neatly highlights what’s deployed, but it not being sorted by numbers looks awfully strange to me—I have probably been staring at it too long that way. It might get some people motivated to update their BIPs to a more adequate status?

However, this Pr already has a lot going on, making me concerned that it will get review, I’m not sure I’d want to open up that can of worms in addition, especially being on the fence.

[murchandamus]

Thanks @ajtowns! It passes CI now.
@real-or-random, what do you think is the best course of action? It would probably make sense to first get the licensing update you propose in?

[ajtowns]

I wonder if it would be worthwhile splitting the list of BIPs in the README by status.

I like the change to "BIP-nnn"; it looks nice.

However, this Pr already has a lot going on,

I wasn't meaning to imply it should be part of this PR; my understanding was further improvements could still be made once BIP-3 was active.

[murchandamus]

Ah sorry, I misunderstood that. Yeah, afterwards sounds good to me, as the reordering of the README table would conflict with all of the changes here.

[murchandamus]

Cherry-picked the commit from #1891 to add support for the Version field to scripts/buildtable.pl, thanks @nothingmuch.

[real-or-random]

@real-or-random, what do you think is the best course of action? It would probably make sense to first get the licensing update you propose in?

See #1892.