[Pkg-bitcoin-devel] Bug#734597: litecoin: Litecoin still builds with system LevelDB

[Scott Howard]

Hey Dmitry,

On Sun, Jan 19, 2014 at 10:34 PM, Dmitry Smirnov <onlyjob at debian.org> wrote:
> Hi Scott,
>
> Thanks for the relevant links to the discussion that I wasn't aware of.
>
> On Thu, 9 Jan 2014 10:02:37 Scott Howard wrote:
>> If you disagree, I'd be interested in hearing why.
>
> Mostly my decision is based on our policy. I'm convinced that
> discouraging linking to private libraries is one of the best practices
> that we have in Debian. No only it benefit security but also it helps
> to maintain coherent up-to-date distribution, encourage communication
> and cooperation between maintainers as well as compartmentalise
> development without unnecessary duplication.

I totally agree re: discouraging linking to private libraries as one
of the best practices in Debian. I spent a weekend, not too long ago,
pulling libtiff out of freeimage. I agree that long term, bitcoin
should use system libraries. I think upstream's (and my own personal)
opinion is that bitcoin protocol and network isn't evolved enough for
widespread stable releases using system libraries. For example, see
the current MtGox controversy where their implementation and the
satoshi implementation is clashing (there are no standards) [1]. That
has nothing to do with system libraries, but it illustrates the fact
that even the experts are having trouble understanding and predicting
the effects of changes to network implementation.

> I'd be interested to know if there are any additional steps to ensure
> its proper functioning.

I asked this of upstream too, at one point, and the response was that
there is nothing to ensure proper functioning yet. They can't make
tests for problems they don't know will come up because of changes to
things outside of their control (including modification of the
reference client, per [1]). The do know that such problems may be
catastrophic to the network (any loss of faith in the network can
cause the loss of billions of dollars). In my opinion, the risk does
not outweigh the reward - but as the network standardizes (note: there
is no bitcoin protocol specification: the satoshi reference client
*is* the protocol specification) and things such as blockchain
self-healing is studied and understood better. I think, at this point,
the whole bitcoin experiment is still fragile and is under rapid
development, I believe building with embedded libraries will help
nurture the experiment (and is one of the reasons it should not be in
testing yet). At some point, bitcoin will be mature enough to walk on
its own - and we can do the normal debian things: build with system
libraries, migrate to testing, updates to backports/jessie-updates,
etc.

At some point we should move to system libraries and help bitcoin
developers with the appropriate tests and mechanisms so they can trust
system libraries as well. I don't think we are at that point yet. When
we reach that point, we also will probably have safe enough packages
for inclusion in Debian and Ubuntu.

~Scott


[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1x93tf/some_irc_chatter_about_what_is_going_on_at_mtgox/cf99yac