Quote from: willphase on August 05, 2011, 10:13:24 PM

I have no issues trusting you, I've seen your posts here and on the bitcoin-dev mailing list and wouldn't have any issues either running a binary supplied by you or just simply building your code from source - in fact I suggested that you put binaries up to make your client more accessible to the masses.

OK I misunderstood that part, I read it as binaries being more trustable so I thought huh

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I think my point perhaps was poorly explained in my post. My point is that the average user is going to 1. Google for bitcoin, 2. click on the top link, and 3. download the windows client.

Yes -- I do intend to do a binary release, probably in parallel with the next mainline release (so that there is a wx and qt version). I'm already working on a cross-compilation environment to built it in, but it is quite involved. I do have some help with Linux packages, but for Windows I'm on my own (and myself I hardly use it).

Apart from that it will be easier to get my version into the official repositories of Linux distributions such as Ubuntu as it does not depend on some arcane Wx version.

It's all being worked on but there's a lot to do and so little time...

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If we want to work on the average user's user experience it's important that we concentrate efforts on improving the mainline client. The alternative to this would be to place easy to access and easy to install binaries on the bitcoin.org website so people can have a choice between your client and the mainline one.

My UI is scheduled for inclusion into the mainline client eventually. I'm just not sure when. This is why this thread is called "future bitcoin client GUI". Only if you want a sneak peak, you need to build it yourself for now.

But for that reason it's indeed a waste of time to implement usability features in the mainline client. So if I discouraged you in doing that, that's exactly the point

So that you can direct your development efforts to some place they make sense...

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The only criticism I had was more a philosophical one that if someone comes in and says 'hey I'm going to fix this bug in mainline' or 'hey I'm going to add this new feature in mainline' then you pop into the thread and say 'oh I already have that in my client' - but very very few people are using your client (see above) then it makes volunteers far less likely to contribute to mainline (or at least that was how I felt when I said I was going to implement a usability feature in mainline in another thread)

I don't have exact statistics, but by the amount of feedback I get, it seems a lot of people are using my client already (which isn't too strange, as I have some features that have been requested for ages).

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I would prefer to see more activity on mainline, more people contributing e.g. to the test suites, stability improvements, UI improvements, audit of the code, assurance that mainline is being improved and released in a timely manor, than for the scant development resource to be thinly spread over several clients.

My client shares all the network code with the mainline client, so test suites and stability improvements apply to both. I regularly merge in the mainline repository... And have also contributed back some patches.

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I totally understand why you started your client, probably a combination of the inertia of pulling code into mainline, and the belief that having client diversity is good for Bitcoin as a whole

Not entirely. I started my client to make a more attractive, usable and feature-rich UI for Bitcoin. It has existed in limbo much longer than originally planned, but that's indeed due to the inertia thing...