[ikeboy]

>there's no code that decides whether the fork happens beside what flags the nodes are launched with

That's not what you said above. You claimed that the mere fact that it's a hardfork means that you cannot implement anything to only activate if there's a majority. But it's extremely simple to do so. Just check whether a supermajority or a plain majority of recent blocks have signalled support for the hard fork, and only produce hardfork blocks if they have.

Quoting from the blog post https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/07/15/to-fork-or-not-to-fork/

>The community tool carbonvote will be used to set the default fork option for Geth. At block number 1894000 the votes will be tallied, and the outcome will determine whether the default is set to fork or not to fork. Then merging the DAO fork PRs will proceed, followed shortly by a release for both Geth and Mist.

So they're only going to merge the hardfork code if they already have the votes.

[Zagitta]

i did not mean to imply that a hardfork can't be implemented in that fashion, I should indeed have written "the hardfork" instead of "a hardfork" as that's the way this specific hardfork has been implemented, I appologies English is not my native language.

My understanding of that blog post is only what the default value of supporting or not supporting is meaning the hardfork code will be merged in either case and that it's only whether it's active by default that's changed depending on the vote.

Not that it really matters anymore as block number 1894000 has already passed and the code merged with hardfork support enabled by default.