Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

cmd/go: avoid term "notary" to avoid confusion with CNCF Notary #30835

Closed
rsc opened this issue Mar 14, 2019 · 18 comments
Closed

cmd/go: avoid term "notary" to avoid confusion with CNCF Notary #30835

rsc opened this issue Mar 14, 2019 · 18 comments
Labels
FrozenDueToAge NeedsDecision Feedback is required from experts, contributors, and/or the community before a change can be made.
Milestone

Comments

@rsc
Copy link
Contributor

rsc commented Mar 14, 2019

#25530 proposes securing releases with a transparent log served by a service called a notary.
I adopted both the term and the behavior (publish observations of the internet) from the CMU Perspectives system.

It's been pointed out to me that CNCF has a project called Notary, which turns out to be written Go, but of course is different from our notary.

This issue is to rename the Go notary service to avoid confusion with the CNCF Notary system. Because the notary is basically a giant go.sum database server, I am currently inclined toward “summary.” We would s/notary/summary service/ when talking about a server and s/notary/summary/ or s/notary/sum/ elsewhere (something like $GOROOT/lib/sum/sum.cfg, GET /sum/supported; https://summary.golang.org/; and so on).

This probably won't happen for a few weeks at least. Happy bikeshedding!

@rsc rsc added this to the Go1.13 milestone Mar 14, 2019
@bcmills
Copy link
Contributor

bcmills commented Mar 14, 2019

Because the notary is basically a giant go.sum database server, I am currently inclined toward “summary.”

“module summary” carries connotations of documentation for me. Perhaps “summator”, as in “one who summates”?

@ericlagergren
Copy link
Contributor

Summary—and derivatives—do not have the same connotations as notary.

At the very least it could be changed to a synonym of notary:

  • registrar
  • witness
  • recorder

Or services that are similar to notaries:

  • signatory
  • medallion

etc.

@FiloSottile
Copy link
Contributor

I am still fond of "clerk", as it keeps the receipts.

(I think it came from @bcmills originally? I did not come up with it.)

@agnivade
Copy link
Contributor

Late to the party, but here goes -

  • ledger
  • auditor

@bcmills
Copy link
Contributor

bcmills commented Mar 14, 2019

Ooh, “ledger” is nice. It even carries that nice “repository of sums” connotation!

@FiloSottile
Copy link
Contributor

Please not "ledger". It will lead to endless confusion as to whether we are using a blockchain or even issued a token (which should sound ludicrous, but look up how Namecoin works), and we don't have two columns and a balance anyway.

Auditors are third-party entities in a transparency log ecosystem, they are the ones that follow the log and make sure it's operated honestly.

@mvdan
Copy link
Member

mvdan commented Mar 14, 2019

I agree with "clerk", if anything because it seems to mean "they who keep records/notes/history".

We also have other words in that vicinity, like "scribe", "bookkeeper", "registrar", or "notetaker". Or perhaps even "historian", since it keeps a history of published modules.

@jimmyfrasche
Copy link
Member

Grandmaster Hash

@komuw
Copy link
Contributor

komuw commented Mar 15, 2019

  • notaio

@kybin
Copy link
Contributor

kybin commented Mar 16, 2019

  • summer
  • grandsum

@AlexRouSg
Copy link
Contributor

Kinda surprised no one said NoteyMcNoterface yet

@bcmills bcmills added the NeedsDecision Feedback is required from experts, contributors, and/or the community before a change can be made. label Mar 28, 2019
@oiooj
Copy link
Member

oiooj commented Apr 6, 2019

sum.golang.org? Since we have a go.sum.

@rsc
Copy link
Contributor Author

rsc commented Apr 10, 2019

This service is an implementation detail - an important one - but not something anyone should be focusing on. The cute name gives it more focus than it arguably should have. We don't have a cute name for, say, the go command build cache.

The hostname will be sum.golang.org instead of notary.golang.org, as @oiooj suggested, but beyond that, I think we'll try just not using any other name at all. If you need to refer to the service-without-a-short-name, call it the "Go module checksum service" (or just sum.golang.org).

@rsc rsc closed this as completed Apr 10, 2019
@rsc rsc reopened this Apr 10, 2019
@rsc
Copy link
Contributor Author

rsc commented Apr 10, 2019

Reopening because we need to excise the term "notary" from various docs and code. Then this can be closed.

@rsc rsc changed the title cmd/go: rename Go Notary to avoid confusion with CNCF Notary cmd/go: avoid term "notary" to avoid confusion with CNCF Notary Apr 10, 2019
@gopherbot
Copy link

Change https://golang.org/cl/171977 mentions this issue: notary/internal/tlog: remove use of 'notary'

@gopherbot
Copy link

Change https://golang.org/cl/171978 mentions this issue: notary/internal/note: remove use of 'notary'

gopherbot pushed a commit to golang/exp that referenced this issue Apr 17, 2019
We are avoiding the term 'notary' to avoid confusion
with the CNCF Notary project.

For golang/go#30835.

Change-Id: Iebc053302128406f54bdb056c3b13fa208cff7bc
Reviewed-on: https://go-review.googlesource.com/c/exp/+/171977
Run-TryBot: Russ Cox <rsc@golang.org>
TryBot-Result: Gobot Gobot <gobot@golang.org>
Reviewed-by: Filippo Valsorda <filippo@golang.org>
gopherbot pushed a commit to golang/exp that referenced this issue Apr 17, 2019
We are avoiding the term 'notary' to avoid confusion
with the CNCF Notary project.

For golang/go#30835.

Change-Id: I4524247ef357d692b8f9592801c5b480cbfb6a3d
Reviewed-on: https://go-review.googlesource.com/c/exp/+/171978
Reviewed-by: Filippo Valsorda <filippo@golang.org>
@gopherbot
Copy link

Change https://golang.org/cl/173737 mentions this issue: sumdb: mv notary sumdb

gopherbot pushed a commit to golang/exp that referenced this issue Apr 26, 2019
We are changing the name "Go notary" to "Go checksum database"
to avoid confusion with the CNCF Notary.

This CL renames the x/exp/notary tree to x/exp/sumdb.

For golang/go#30835.

Change-Id: I348d31050e760a08335882b640edca4f89d86920
Reviewed-on: https://go-review.googlesource.com/c/exp/+/173737
Run-TryBot: Russ Cox <rsc@golang.org>
TryBot-Result: Gobot Gobot <gobot@golang.org>
Reviewed-by: Filippo Valsorda <filippo@golang.org>
Reviewed-by: Brad Fitzpatrick <bradfitz@golang.org>
@rsc
Copy link
Contributor Author

rsc commented Apr 30, 2019

This is done. (The new term is Go checksum database, or sumdb for short.)

@rsc rsc closed this as completed Apr 30, 2019
@golang golang locked and limited conversation to collaborators Apr 29, 2020
Sign up for free to subscribe to this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in.
Labels
FrozenDueToAge NeedsDecision Feedback is required from experts, contributors, and/or the community before a change can be made.
Projects
None yet
Development

No branches or pull requests