BtcDrak was working on rebasing my CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY¹ patch to master a few days ago and found a fairly large design change that makes merging it currently impossible. Pull-req #4890², specifically commit c7829ea7, changed the EvalScript() function to take an abstract SignatureChecker object, removing the txTo and nIn arguments that used to contain the transaction the script was in and the txin # respectively. CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY needs txTo to obtain the nLockTime field of the transaction, and it needs nIn to obtain the nSequence of the txin.

We need to fix this if CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY is to be merged. Secondly, that this change was made, and the manner in which is was made, is I think indicative of a development process that has been taking significant risks with regard to refactoring the consensus critical codebase. I know I personally have had a hard time keeping up with the very large volume of code being moved and changed for the v0.10 release, and I know BtcDrak - who is keeping Viacoin up to date with v0.10 - has also had a hard time giving the changes reasonable review. The #4890 pull-req in question had no ACKs at all, and only two untested utACKS, which I find worrying for something that made significant consensus critical code changes. While it would be nice to have a library encapsulating the consensus code, this shouldn't come at the cost of safety, especially when the actual users of that library or their needs is still uncertain. This is after all a multi-billion project where a simple fork will cost miners alone tens of thousands of dollars an hour; easily much more if it results in users being defrauded. That's also not taking into account the significant negative PR impact and loss of trust. I personally would recommend *not* upgrading to v0.10 due to these issues. A much safer approach would be to keep the code changes required for a consensus library to only simple movements of code for this release, accept that the interface to that library won't be ideal, and wait until we have feedback from multiple opensource projects with publicly evaluatable code on where to go next with the API. 1) https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0065.mediawiki 2) https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/4890 -- 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org 00000000000000001b18a596ecadd07c0e49620fb71b16f9e41131df9fc52fa6

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