Absent authors and BIP updates

Hello,

People come in as Bitcoin developers all the time, but sometimes people also leave permanently. In the case of BIP authors, when a user leaves and does not respond to (reasonable) requests to change their BIPs, we are sort of stuck right now.

BIP-2 states that anyone is allowed to request a change of a draft/proposed BIP to "rejected" status after 3 years of inactivity, but sometimes BIPs are accepted, after which the author leaves.

See e.g. https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/pull/339

There are a couple of ways to address this:

1. We allow anyone to request a change of a draft/proposed BIP to "accepted", at any time. It is upon the requester to prove within reason that the BIP does fulfill the criteria as given in BIP-2. Such a request does not need the approval of the BIP author.

2. We allow BIPs to expire after 3 years, and allow the BIP repository maintainer to assign a new champion, once/if such a champion appeared.

3. We do neither, and when such is warranted, we make new BIPs with new assignations which supercede the old BIP, sort of like how BIP 2 supercedes BIP 1. Without the author to sign off on the change though, it may not be obvious enough since we can't modify the original BIP.

4. Other approach / fine as it is.

On Tuesday 23 July 2019 15:09:02 Karl-Johan Alm via bitcoin-dev wrote:

> People come in as Bitcoin developers all the time, but sometimes
> people also leave permanently. In the case of BIP authors, when a user
> leaves and does not respond to (reasonable) requests to change their
> BIPs, we are sort of stuck right now.

BIP 2 allows assigning a new champion.

https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0002.mediawiki#Transferring_BIP_Ownership