Self-mergers are potentially a systemic risk to open source projects like Bitcoin. They occur when a maintainer merges code into master that they themselves produced, with little to no oversight or peer review. Self-merges represent unilateral, unaudited code changes to production code and, as such, carry inherent danger.
While the public nature of Bitcoin core development and its culture tend to prevent this behavior, some examples have been identified in the wild.
A dedicated data analysis structure and page to track these events into the future and review them in the past would be very interesting and useful as a key health metric of Bitcoin Core.
The topic should be handled with care, as false positives may exist, and throughout time, the quality of core development and its rigor has overall improved. Nevertheless, examples of self-merges should be displayed in ways that let the user understand what happened, who the actors involved were, and the historical context, ongoing conversations or lack thereof, about the merge.
Self-mergers are potentially a systemic risk to open source projects like Bitcoin. They occur when a maintainer merges code into master that they themselves produced, with little to no oversight or peer review. Self-merges represent unilateral, unaudited code changes to production code and, as such, carry inherent danger.
While the public nature of Bitcoin core development and its culture tend to prevent this behavior, some examples have been identified in the wild.
A dedicated data analysis structure and page to track these events into the future and review them in the past would be very interesting and useful as a key health metric of Bitcoin Core.
The topic should be handled with care, as false positives may exist, and throughout time, the quality of core development and its rigor has overall improved. Nevertheless, examples of self-merges should be displayed in ways that let the user understand what happened, who the actors involved were, and the historical context, ongoing conversations or lack thereof, about the merge.