Why should I have to:
1) cause extra wasteful traffic in the blockstream to send money to myself as a workaround
2) pay any related transaction fees for something that shouldn't require network traffic
3) justify wanting to use a (currently broken) feature that has a button right inside armory in a conspicuous place
My dealbreaker isn't wanting a feature to work. It's that project lead / main dev has a half-arsed feature that doesn't work...
What's with wanting to shift blame to people who have a use for the feature rather than fix the current state of incompatibility.
Please allow me to share a story with you, about why this seems half-assed. It's a kind of outlier in Armory's feature set, since most of the other features are very well-developed and stable.
There was high demand for wallet migration just before Bitcoin-Qt 0.6.0. I implemented it. It worked. Flawlessly. With encrypted wallets, and everything. I put a lot of time into catching everything that could go wrong: wallets updating mid-migraion, catching duplicate addresses existing in your other wallets, preventing alt-network wallets, and providing notifications and intuitive ways to deal with all of it. It
was a high quality feature.
Then, a month later, the main devs decided to switch to compressed public keys which requires a whole new wallet format for Armory.
I was crushed. This feature which met all the needs of the users requesting it became basically useless. However, at the time, most people still were using wallets that were made prior to 0.6.0. So I added the warning and left the feature in there.
Now it's been many months. Maybe it's time to remove it, until I update the wallet format. Most new users will have created their wallets post 0.6.0 so the number of users who benefit from it is small. But that's why it is the way it is. And the point has been made that I need to add a warning to the address-import dialog. So far, you are the first user who has pulled individual keys out of wallet.dat to import (and told me about it).
I didn't mean to "shift blame". It's that many users do not recognize the risk of managing addresses from multiple wallets. They don't realize they could be shooting themselves in the foot. And on top of it, it's never been something I personally had a use for. So I was asking to make sure that the users requesting it actually understood it. Because in the end, supporting this is a
a lot of work, and I have a ton of other priorities to balance.
Finally, I had a flurry of nearly identical requests/complaints in the past couple days and I didn't understand why users would say that Armory is "useless" without it. However, someone posted good information about why this feature is necessary,
and I thus conceded. It will happen. Although, I am still bothered by the "useless" comment (but the user did say "useless to me", so that's fairly reasonable).
For now, if you cannot accept the lack of that feature, then please subscribe to the
announcements thread which only triggers notifications on new, final releases (maybe one every few weeks). When the new wallet format is done, that will surely be announced.
