Argument-0004: Retention at Rank 1

Report Date	Date of submission (2025/04/03)
Submitted by	Christian Langenbacher

Member details

• Matrix username: @clang:matrix.org
• Polkadot address: 16YCL3UVpVWQLGW3p3Zx4k5WAEp9W1DwdDnxAbyAaPxVxnp3
• Current rank: 1
• Date of initial induction: 2024/03/27
• Date of last report: 2025/01/08
• Area(s) of Expertise/Interest: Parachain Builder, Runtime, Clients

Reporting period

• Start date: 2025/01/08
• End date: 2025/04/03

Argument

My argument mostly revolves around PRs and issues that I filed in the Polkadot-SDK repository, which will be elaborated below.

Run frame-omni-bencher Overhead in CI for All Runtimes

I implemented a CI job that runs the frame-omni-bencher-overhead command for all runtimes. A seemingly simple PR, yet it required the runtimes to implement genesis-dev-presets—which most of them lacked at the time of filing the PR. As a result, I also took on the work described in the next section.

Add Genesis Presets for All Runtimes

Since the required genesis presets were missing, as mentioned above, I proactively took ownership of the issue regarding implementing genesis presets for all runtimes and implemented them in a sequence of PRs.

For those who have never used them, these genesis presets are a set of sensible genesis values (e.g., setting Alice as sudo). However, instead of redundantly defining them in the chain-spec, as has been the case until now, the idea is that the runtime itself knows these sensible defaults for dev setups, making those dev setups easier to manage and use.

Hence, I went ahead and implemented the genesis presets for:

• coretime-rococo and coretime-westend,
• people-rococo and people-westend,
• glutton-westend (there is no Rococo variant),
• and the kitchensink-runtime.

Most of the integration was straightforward, but in some cases, it uncovered issues:

• Glutton Westend: Broken extrinsics. The runtime lacks a balances pallet, causing the CheckNonce TxExtension to return a nonexistent account error—even for the sudo account. After raising the issue, bkchr himself quickly addressed it by making the CheckOnlySudo TxExtension provide a tag, allowing us to remove CheckNonce from Glutton (since at least one extension must provide a tag for the transaction pool to identify transactions).

• Immutability of Genesis Presets: Currently, genesis presets are immutable, making them inflexible. I intend to expand their functionality by allowing them to be patched as my next task.

Miscellaneous

• I identified that the Incrementable trait is not implemented according to the documentation, which caused saturation instead of returning None. This could, in theory, lead to new assets overwriting each other if AssetId::MAX were reached. Luckily, all chains are far from that limit. I also fixed this behavior with a PR by properly returning None when the value would saturate.

Voting record

Ranks	Activity thresholds	Agreement thresholds	Member's voting activities	Comments
I	90%	N/A	No elligible referenda
II	80%	N/A
III	70%	100%
IV	60%	90%
V	50%	80%
VI	40%	70%

Misc

• Question(s):

• Concern(s):

• Comment(s):