The New Ethereum Improvement Process
Incoming updates to EIP-1
The new changes to EIP-1 center on one thing: Separating the EIP repo from the hard-fork coordination process.
The EIP repository is intended to be a place for technical specifications. However, by introducing the hard fork coordination process, politics were introduced into the EIP repo.
The new process intends to reduce the amount of politics within the EIP repo by separating the hard-fork coordination process as much as possible.
In the U.S. legislative process, bills are drafted, then a separate process occurs to pass them into law. The EIP repo is seen as a place where EIPs are drafted and kept as records. The hard-fork coordination process now is a separate process that passes EIPs “into law.”
This starts with the removal of the ACCEPTED status.
With the removal of ACCEPTED the EIP process, once one process for Core EIPs, and another process for all other EIPs, now is a single process within the EIP repo.
DRAFT -> REVIEW -> LAST CALL -> FINALA new repository has been made to track the hard-fork coordination process, and which EIPs are in mainnet — Eth1.0-specs.
The New EIP Statuses
The new EIP statuses within the EIP repo are as follows (new statuses in bold):
DRAFTREVIEWLAST CALLFINALLIVINGSTAGNANTWITHDRAWN
Review
REVIEW is a state where the EIP authors signal to everyone that their EIP is ready for external review.
Before, external feedback wouldn’t occur until an EIP was in LAST CALL, which was too late to implement any meaningful feedback.
REVIEW is a state where the author is actively seeking feedback from others. Now, EIPs will go into a REVIEW state before being moved to LAST CALL.
Final
Here, FINAL doesn’t mean that the EIP is live on Ethereum mainnet. It means that the specification is frozen.
Only non-normative changes, such as spelling corrections, can be made to the EIP. Any other changes must happen with a new EIP.
Living
LIVING is a renaming for the previous status ACTIVE , which is the status of EIP-1. The purpose was to more accurately explain what the status is with the name, where LIVING refers to a living document.
It means the EIP can be continually edited and updated.
Stagnant
STAGNANT EIPs are EIPs that have gone stale, with no updates in the past several months. EIPs can be automatically given the status STAGNANT by the EIP bot.
An EIP author can move an EIP out of STAGNANT as it is not a status with finality.
Withdrawn
WITHDRAWN EIPs are EIPs that have formally been removed from consideration from the EIP author. An EIP can only be moved to WITHDRAWN by the EIP author.
The difference between this and STAGNANT is WITHDRAWN has finality. The only way to move an EIP that is WITHDRAWN forward is by creating a new EIP with a new EIP number.
