Command synopses should refer to "grid" rather than "virtual drive"

[davidsarah]

For example, get Retrieve a file from the virtual drive. should be get Retrieve a file from the grid.

"Virtual drive" sounds too much like, say, a Windows drive mapping, which is not how users think of it when using the CLI.

[davidsarah]

Also there are a couple of uses of "virtual drive" in documentation.

[warner]

"virtual drive" should certainly go away.. much of the text which references it was written back in the era of the ambient "/private" URL, when we still had the idea of a single virual drive per user. Now that we encourage people to think in terms of a graph of dirnodes and rootcaps-as-starting-points, that's not such a great term to use.

I'm ok with "grid", but I'm not convinced it's all that great either. When I hear "grid", I think of the mesh of storage servers, or some abstract cloudy storagey thing. I don't immediately think of the graph of dirnodes and filenodes.

I guess "grid" is perfectly file for command synopses. At some point, we need to come up with a good term for the filenode graph (maybe "filenode graph" :) for use in the other pieces of documentation that refer specifically to it as opposed to the backend storage system.

[zooko]

The term I've been using for that is "the decentralized filesystem": docs/architecture.txt?rev=4134#L17.

[davidsarah]

Whenever someone proposes a term I always count the number of syllables: "de-cen-tral-ized file-sys-tem" (7). "Grid" (meaning the abstract cloudy storagey thing implemented on top of a particular mesh of servers) is both much more concise, and sounds more Gibsonesque :-)

The terminology collision with "grid layer" could be handled by renaming the latter to "mesh layer". That would allow us architecture types to continue to make precise distinctions (needed for #869, for instance).

[davidsarah]

Grepping the source tree for "grid", there are a lot of uses, but very few of them are using it in the precise sense defined in source:docs/architecture.txt

[zooko]

For what it is worth (and I'm not sure that is very much) "Grid" was the term for computing-as-infrastructure before "Cloud" became the term for that. The "Grid" computing people are more from a scientific computing background and the Cloud computing people are more from Net-business, I think.

I use "the grid" brevity when it doesn't matter which layer I'm talking about, as in "the put command uploads a file to the grid", but if I want to distinguish between (a) the set of machines, (b) the distributed key-value store layer, (c) the filesystem layer, then I use the longer term "decentralized filesystem".

So, what I'm saying is I welcome your ideas about terminology, and I don't think that my current terminology is perfect, but if you want to use "grid" to mean the filesystem layer, then what's the key-value-store layer? Or are they both the same for this terminology?

[davidsarah]

Replying to zooko:

I use "the grid" brevity when it doesn't matter which layer I'm talking about, as in "the put command uploads a file to the grid", but if I want to distinguish between (a) the set of machines, (b) the distributed key-value store layer, (c) the filesystem layer, then I use the longer term "decentralized filesystem".

So, what I'm saying is I welcome your ideas about terminology, and I don't think that my current terminology is perfect, but if you want to use "grid" to mean the filesystem layer, then what's the key-value-store layer?

I don't want to use "grid" to mean the filesystem layer; I want to use it when it doesn't matter which layer. The key-value-store layer would be renamed to "mesh layer".

[zooko]

The key-vale-store layer of Tahoe-LAFS is similar to the NoSQL systems: ​http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NoSQL . I would really like to emphasize the similarities so that people who are familiar with NoSQL (which is a rapidly growing set) will have an easier time learning about Tahoe-LAFS. How about calling the the "key-value-store layer". :-)

[davidsarah]

Diff to remove references to 'vdrive' and 'virtual drive', and some other cleanups to architecture.txt and command synopses

[warner]

reviewed and committed, d3d1293d2fee8b62. My only changes were to wrap a few long lines. Thanks!