As I remember, in the BIP50 fork, Gavin first thought we should follow the longest chain, and Luke suggested to orphan the longest chain.
As someone who was there and involved in dealing with it I don't recall any _dispute_, I'm really unhappy about the history revisionism people throw around hwere— it was obvious what needed to be done: there was a chain that was acceptable to all nodes, and a chain that was acceptable to a small minority (which, on quick testing didn't include many major businesses)— because of the consolidation of hash-power around pools the mining deployed software looked very much unlike the systems overall, but even if it had been a slim majority only one was acceptable to all nodes. Being acceptable to all nodes meant that the issue could be healed back to consensus immediately— as soon as the acceptable-to-all chain was also the longest, the other side would have meant weeks of split consensus as people gradually fixed their software.I am not saying that there were any dispute. At least we may have some SOP: in case there is an accidental fork, we prefer the more restrictive one until a better solution is available. I hope this won't eventually make the rules too restrictive.
