A better coordination with electrs?

I’m a contributor to electrs and I wonder if we could improve coordination so that accidents like #6772 don’t happen. From experience I know that being unable to access money is pretty annoying. As a full node experience provider I would also like to have more confidence in Electrum.

I’m not sure what the best approach is but one idea that comes to my mind is that Electrum could make the release process a bit more formal. You could announce “protocol freeze” phase and give some time (two weeks?) for server developers to respond. During this period no protocol changes are accepted. If a protocol change must be implemented (due to a vulnerability or other critical problem) then the whole period would be restarted.

Is this approach useful/acceptable? Please let me know if I’m missing something.

The above idea is based on my understanding of the situation: nobody noticed that a new version of Electrum was released and so it wasn’t tested in time. It should be possible to release a new version of electrs quickly but the time required is still not zero. Please correct me if I’m wrong.

Cc @romanz

[romanz]

FTR, I am now using Docker to run integration tests with the latest Electrum wallet: https://github.com/romanz/electrs/runs/1532679984

[ecdsa]

@Kixunil see also #6778