swh-loader-tar (used in the revision creation with a field called extrinsic with two properties provide and tool)

I don't think we should change this right now, but convert them when we have a proper storage for extrinsic revision metadata

In T2381#43854, @vlorentz wrote:

swh-loader-tar (used in the revision creation with a field called extrinsic with two properties provide and tool)

I don't think we should change this right now, but convert them when we have a proper storage for extrinsic revision metadata

I prefer doing a complete change of terminology, we shouldn't have one part with old terms and new implementations with the new terms..
Doing it now, will prevent future ambiguities.

You correctly mention uniformity as a positive thing to have.
But term correctness is also a positive value, in my opinion.

So, before deciding: do you (@moranegg) consider the old terms superior/more correct than the new proposed ones?
FWIW, "authority" seems to me more appropriate than "provider"; and "tool" is a term so generic to be meaningless (it strikes me as very similar to the historical mistake we made when we decided to blobs "contents").

If we agree that the initially proposed terms are more correct than the legacy ones we have, we need to weigh whether consistency is a more important argument than correctness.
If it isn't a better argument, we should maybe plan to adapt the legacy terms to the new ones instead?
(I'm mentioning this because the risk here is to have to do the transition you suggest now, and later on do it again a transition in the other direction.)

thanks ! for the feedback..

when searching for correctness, seems that we use provider also as the source code provider (which is more accurate, IMO)
we might want to accentuate this difference, authority for metadata and provider for code.

The deposit today, has a provider (of the source code package) and an authority (for the metadata associated) which is the same actor - the deposit client.

In this choice, a metadata deposit does not have a provider, it has only an authority.

So when going to the loader and deposit, we need to have this distinction in mind and keep the term provider where it's about the software artifacts
and authority where manipulating the metadata objects.

Regarding tool and fetcher, I intuitively think that fetcher is not the "correct" term for deposit (because the metadata is pushed)
But I can get used to that.
I agree that tool is too generic and I don't have a better proposition.

The reason for the task, validating these terms, was not to have a future discussion (after implementation) discussing if we all agree on the terminology and if not, do we need to search for new terms, or go back to the old terms.

Bottom line

We agree that we are moving to authority and fetcher for extrinsic metadata.
Now we need to identify the modules and documentation affected by this change of terminology to have it updated (with the distinction I have presented above).

For the code itself, we need to transition either way, as the interface changed. So changing the terminology in the code is free.

@vlorentz what do you mean with free?

I mean it doesn't require any extra work.