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Hudson Jameson, a member of the Ethereum Foundation, recently spoke about the major issues faced during Ethereum Ropsten Testnet Constantinople hard fork, during a discussion with EthHub.
According to the latest announcement, the Constantinople hard fork is scheduled to take place on block #7,280,000 around February 27, 2019. The initial hard fork, which was scheduled to take place around January 16, 2019, was delayed due to issues with one of the five proposed Ethereum Improvement Protocols.
EIP 1283: the net gas metering for SSTORE without dirty maps had potential of enabling a Reentrancy attack on smart contract after Constantinople hard fork. This lead to the Foundation concluding that it would be best to postpone the upgrade until a solution is found.
Notably, this is not the first time Constantinople hit the pause button. The hard fork was initially scheduled to take place towards the end of 2018. However, the team encountered issues during the Ropsten Testnet hard fork launch. According to the post-mortem report of the Ropsten Constantinople Testnet, there was a bug identified in the Parity implementation of Ethereum. In addition, there were problems encountered with difference between Parity and Geth consensus.
On this, Hudson Jameson stated that the Testnet split because of the issues between Geth and Parity, and that the fork occurred during the weekend, which was contrary to their planning. He stated that they timed it incorrectly as block times “can be tricky to nail down.” This, in turn, resulted in a delay in fixing the Testnet.
According to him, one of the main reasons it failed was the lack of preparation. The absence of miners ready to mine the new chain was also one of the problems encountered during the fork, Hudson stated;
“The circumstances around it and if you just go to the really deepest level of why things are the way they are and why there are so many inefficiencies, it’s because a lot of us are very developer heavy, within the core developer ecosystem and we don’t have a lot of people with traditional or enterprise management experience”
He further stated:
“But then once you start to plan things, we have other tasks that we’re dealing with than our respective foundation or respective jobs. So that makes it more difficult for us to go in and have the right skill set to actually organize appropriate hard fork. We don’t have project management experience in a traditional sense.”