Athens: Vote: Renaming the project

[carolynvs]

Suggestion: Rename the project to something that most go developers would at least recognize as being a) related to go and b) solving a problem (such as dependency mgmt, proxies, modules, etc).

I'm going to reply to this issue with suggestions that people can vote on using 👍 or 👎 . Feel free to contribute your own suggestions, but please it would really help if you formulated your replies in the same format, so that they are votable as well.

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Background

At GopherCon it became painfully obvious that continuing to use the codenames "Athens" and "Olympus" is hurting understanding of our project. No one understood what "Project Athens" was, that it was even associated with: go, modules, goproxy, etc. During our workshop, explaining the difference between Athens, proxy and Olympus was difficult and confusing for our new contributors.

We chatted about this among the maintainers and during our dev meeting yesterday, and decided to vote on new names.

[carolynvs]

Project Name: Gomods
Sub-project Names:

• Gomods Proxy
• Gomods Registry
• Gomods (whatever else we may come up with)

[carolynvs]

Project Name: Gopher Collective
Sub-project Names:

• Gopher Community Proxy
• Gopher Community Registry

[carolynvs]

Project Name: GopherPacks
Sub-project Names:

• GopherPacks Proxy
• GopherPacks Registry

[carolynvs]

ProjectName: GoMods
Sub-project Names:

• GoProxy
• GoRegistry

[shoenig]

Note that there is another open source Go Module Proxy under the name modprox, and refers to its components as modprox proxy and modprox registry. In case that factors into the desire to avoid naming confusion/conflict here.
https://modprox.org/
https://github.com/modprox/mp

[marwan-at-work]

I think we should wait on renaming anything until we figure out what to do with Olympus on a technical and an architectural level.

For example, if Olympus/Proxy ended up getting merged into one thing: then we can just call the server itself Athens and that's it. In other words if someone asks "what's Athens?" We'll have a simple answer: it's a GOPROXY implementation. There's only one server inside the Athens repo, and that is the Athens server.

But if Olympus becomes a big thing that's totally separate from the "proxy" that we currently have, then yes, it's worth looking at better naming of things.

[arschles]

good point @marwan-at-work. here's my proposal:

1. We make olympus a "registry" and call it the "gomods registry". you'd publish to the registry with a CLI - gomods publish 1.3.1 or similar (and it could support custom domains maybe?)
2. we keep the proxy as it is now and call it the "gomods proxy". we could (and already do) run proxies publically too, so that people can go get github.com/my/package. packages still come out of VCSes

thoughts?

[marwan-at-work]

@arschles a much easier solution is to just have the registry be the only public one and wait on Go1.12 to fix this issue: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/26334

[marwan-at-work]

I'd love to suggest that our names should be unique in that it won't be confused with other Go Proxies that the open source community is building. For example: gomods and goproxy are easily confused and there's already a a goproxy.io -- so I suggest that we shouldn't be gomods.

For example, GopherPacks sounds the best so far. But other people might build GopherProxies or GopherMods and I'd easily confuse them together.

I'll add suggestions as other comments once my creativity kicks in, if ever :)

[arschles]

As of #772, we've decided that we're not going to build a registry, so the confusion between the proxy and registry that @marwan-at-work mentioned here is no longer.

So I'm adding a voting option here for the name "Athens Proxy"

[arschles]

I'm putting this under v0.1.0 because I think it would be a good idea to decide on a name before releasing a beta

[arschles]

At the October 18, 2018 developer meeting, we discussed #664. Since we decided in #772 that we're not gonna do a registry, we decided that the vote should change a little bit because we don't have to distinguish between the proxy and registry.

I said in the meeting that I would create a new vote between "Gomods proxy" and "Athens proxy." I thought about it and decided that we should move on and call this the Athens proxy since it's what we've been doing already.

I am going to close this issue now and finalize us on "Athens proxy."

Let's move forward with our v0.1.0 beta release :smile: