Introduction

This document explains the steps we are taking while planning for Holocene and subsequent hard fork upgrades to the OP stack. Since we started working fully in public repositories, we have also adapted our upgrade planning process accordingly. From now on, we will share all planning updates on GitHub.

Hard fork planning steps

1️⃣ Post your upgrade proposal as a GitHub discussion

The first step for any hard fork planning is to present the overall plan for your upgrade in our GitHub discussion forum. See our Holocene public discussion and planning thread for some good examples**.**

• WHY?
  • We use this step to explain all the reasons why something should be included in a hard fork release, but also to scope out the work that we plan to do.
• WHO?
  • This step can be completed by any OP core contributor who wants to suggest ideas for an upcoming hard fork.

2️⃣ Make others aware of your proposal

Step two is to share your proposal publicly and make people aware of it, for example on the OP R&D Discord Server. Explain the scope and motivation, and provide everyone with more details about it.

Also, in this step, we should provide overall feedback and comments for other contributors who are adding suggestions and ideas for this specific hard fork plan.

• WHY?
  • We use this step to refine the scope and receive feedback from all the contributors who want to be involved in hard fork scoping.
• WHO?
  • All interested OP core contributors. The “Initial proposer” of the hard fork scope should be present to facilitate the discussion and provide feedback on the scoping ideas.

3️⃣ Post the proposal as a standalone issue

Step three is to close out the public conversation and comments and to convert each proposal into a dedicated issue that will be displayed in the Backlog view of the Mainnet upgrades tracker.

Please provide as much detail as possible within the issue you create here. We will use this information to manage the entire delivery for the specific hard fork we are collaborating on.

• WHY?
  • We clarify our included scope for the hard fork and let everyone interested see what we want to focus on for this hard fork.
• WHO?
  • All core contributors who were a part of the public hard fork discussion can add items to the backlog on the board. We will determine the scope based on our overall priorities for this upgrade.