Direction of Frontier

[crystalin]

Hi folks,

For Moonbeam we have a lot of custom changes and while we are happy to contribute to the main frontier, it is becoming harder, specially with less people having ability and time to review/merge those.

I don't know if @sorpaas is still around but if not I'd suggest we start to think of a new direction for Frontier. Some parachain are already using Moonbeam's fork of Frontier for their production runtime so we should find a solution to keep frontier maintainable and consistent with every parachain using it.

Let me know what you think.

[boundless-forest]

Thanks for bringing up this issue; it's truly a concern for this repo now. We lack sufficient developers or maintainers to drive the repo to improve continuously. I'm willing to contribute, but with Darwinia's current focus on dapp development and integration, I have to address some dapp issues and don't have extra time to develop features for this repo. I can handle necessary bug fixes and PR reviews.

[conr2d]

I am using Frontier in our parachain development. It seems like the development of rust-ethereum/evm has mostly stalled, and to continuously adopt changes from Ethereum, there are remaining features we may need to add or modify in the long term.

I am interested in contributing to Frontier, but the current development and feedback cycle seems taking time, making it challenging to directly push code into the main repository. As a result, I’ve been considering forking the project instead.

If there is an active group contributing to Frontier, I’d love to discuss and collaborate on improving it together.

[crystalin]

Since frontier is going to have another audit soonm we (at MSL) will try to push our cherry-picks upstream. Many people are using MSL fork of frontier but I think we should try to rely on the official repo.

[boundless-forest]

Great, please raise PRs for that. I'll handle the PR review and merge. Would you like to participate in the PR review? @crystalin @conr2d @magecnion

[conr2d]

Sure, feel free to assign a specific PR to me, or I will leave comments on any PRs that I can review.

[magecnion]

Not sure if I have the expertise to provide valuable reviews tbh, but I'm happy to help in any way I can

[crystalin]

Yes, we are opening them and having review is helpful. I don't want to be the one giving the green light if someone else can because I already work internally with the team and I prefer to have someone external sharing their opinion before merging :)