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TheTorProject / lepidopter

lepidopter: raspberry pi image for conducting OONI network measurements
https://ooni.torproject.org/
GNU General Public License v3.0
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Change name to OONI Probe #101

Closed elioqoshi closed 5 years ago

elioqoshi commented 7 years ago

Lepidopter is quite confusing as a name and not having the OONI brand as part of it, distances it from OONI. Calling it OONI Pi would make more sense as it has brand consistency, is a short name and sounds phonetically great (ooniepie)

Edit (by Arturo): We should rename it to simply "OONI Probe"

What do you think 👍 👎 ?

hellais commented 7 years ago

I think this is a solid idea and would also reduce confusion with the lepidopter name, that I have seen people have in remembering and pronouncing it.

elioqoshi commented 7 years ago

@agrabeli @lorenzoPrimi @bassosimone Thoughts?

lorenzoPrimi commented 7 years ago

OONI Pi seems too much short, but I agree with the renaming idea

hellais commented 7 years ago

I am going to propose something radical: how about we just call it "OONI Probe"?

Effectively it's just a different target platform for "OONI Probe" and its actually mostly the same code base. It's not like on mobile we call the software "OONI Mobile" there.

hellais commented 7 years ago

cc @anadahz

elioqoshi commented 7 years ago

OONI Pi seems too much short, but I agree with the renaming idea

I think the same, but phonetically it sounds great. OONI Octopi is another alternative.

elioqoshi commented 7 years ago

@hellais That actually makes total sense. OONI Probe is available for Web and Mobile, while the RPi alternative has a different name. We should call it OONI Probe as that would make the most sense.

anadahz commented 7 years ago

The idea of having the same name for all OONI programs/applications sounds good.

Lepidopter is not a program or application but a distribution based on Debian jessie with a number of programs and dependencies to assist ooni-probe the python program of OONI (https://github.com/TheTorProject/ooni-probe) to automatically perform daily measurements.

Lepidopter is currently available for a number of Raspberry Pi hardware revisions, with future releases targeting different platforms.

hellais commented 7 years ago

@anadahz yes, you are right, however what the end users sees is just ooniprobe. Calling it anything else just leads to confusion. Ooniprobe on mobile also includes a bunch of other libraries and stuff. The tests are actually implemented in measurement-kit. The only reason why somebody downloads lepidopter is to run ooniprobe.

bassosimone commented 7 years ago

Renaming it to OONI Probe would be misleading: we want the things we ship to have a minimal level of differentiation such that, when they report a bug, we understand what they're talking about.

Hence, given the choice between OONI Probe and OONI Pi, I have strong preference for the latter.

Since there is "OONI Probe Android", perhaps there could also be the "OONI Probe Pi". That is, a see a pattern "$maker $role $platform" in all the names proposed.

bassosimone commented 7 years ago

To clarify, after a discussion on IRC with @hellais: I am saying basically that the repository should clearly contain "-pi" in the name and also the version string. Otherwise we create confusion into the users when it is time for them to report a bug (and this is something we would not like to happen).

elioqoshi commented 7 years ago

If it's OONI Probe Web, OONi Probe Android, sure calling it OONI Probe Pi makes sense. But do we differentiate? I don't think we should differentiate because this is mostly a branding decision. Reporting bugs goes to a specific platform of Probe.

elioqoshi commented 7 years ago

Completely agree that all repos should have the platform in their name.

elioqoshi commented 7 years ago

I'd even go there and call it ooni-probe-raspberrypi or something to be very clear

bassosimone commented 7 years ago

Reporting bugs goes to a specific platform of Probe.

I don't think the renaming in itself would make the situation worst, but in general I would not assume this is something as easy as that. I've seen people that know very well our platform reporting bugs for features required in mobile devices onto the desktop repository. I believe that, probably, with my comment I raised a different problem that in itself has not that much to do with the naming.

bassosimone commented 7 years ago

Okay, after some more discussion on IRC, I understand the rationale of renaming lepidopter for consistency even if we're not actively developing it at the moment. As I said on IRC to @elioqoshi, I believe that the goal of being able to say "OONI Probe is available on $platforms" is very good.

bassosimone commented 7 years ago

More discussion points from IRC:

anadahz commented 7 years ago

As I mentioned in https://github.com/TheTorProject/lepidopter/issues/101#issuecomment-330079512 although lepidopter is currently targeted for Raspberry Pi future releases will support different hardware platforms hence the name OONI Probe Pi will be misleading.

The only reason why somebody downloads lepidopter is to run ooniprobe.

A public example of lepidopter usage apart from running ooniprobe is the blocked project.

bassosimone commented 7 years ago

@anadahz could you elaborate on such plans?

hellais commented 7 years ago

@anadahz yeah the proposal is not to call it "OONI Probe Pi", but just a"OONI Probe" as we advertise it as a way for people to run "OONI Probe".

Are you sure others are using it for anything other? If that is the case they are going to be very sad when the auto updates change their system.

In any case if there are to be other versions of it supporting other stuff (which are not available publicly at the moment) we should come up with some alternative branding for that.

bassosimone commented 7 years ago

In any case if there are to be other versions of it supporting other stuff (which are not available publicly at the moment) we should come up with some alternative branding for that.

👍

anadahz commented 7 years ago

@bassosimone there are much cheaper embedded devices out there such as the OrangePi that can perform similarly well to the Raspberry PI. In communication with some people of Devuan and looking at armbian release building for a number of targets with CI and automated builds seems like an approach that lepidopter development should follow.

anadahz commented 7 years ago

Are you sure others are using it for anything other? If that is the case they are going to be very sad when the auto updates change their system.

Indeed perhaps we should offer an option to disable automatic updates in lepidopter for users that would like to do their own administration and maintenance.

bassosimone commented 7 years ago

@anadahz sure, there is opportunity, but are there concrete plans? I mean, is there a roadmap of something concrete enough to justify lepidopter as standalone platform?

agrabeli commented 7 years ago

I think we are over-engineering this.

Lepidopter runs OONI Probe, therefore it is OONI Probe. As such, it only makes sense to call it OONI Probe.

Calling it anything else is not only confusing, but it is also extremely misleading. It implies that it is different software, when actually it is not.

Whatever scripts exist around OONI Probe in "Lepidopter" are irrelevant to users. They care about OONI Probe, which is designed to measure censorship. They don't care about the scripts that make OONI Probe run on hardware platforms (or any other platform, for that matter).

hellais commented 7 years ago

Ok, I am going to try to bring this discussion back into context a second.

Some Facts

  1. Lepidopter, as in what users download from: https://ooni.torproject.org/install/, via the install guide https://ooni.torproject.org/install/lepidopter/, in particular the version https://get.ooni.torproject.org/lepidopter/lepidopter-v1.0.0-armel.img.zip, is primarily for running OONI Probe.

  2. When people download and install lepidopter from the links in point 1, and the web interface via the instructions listed in the official installation guide (via lepidopter.local) see ONLY the OONI Probe web interface

  3. If people use the version of lepidopter in point 1. for running their own custom software, their installation is quite likely going to break since we ship as part of it an auto updater system that touches also system files

  4. We don't make any guarantee in any of the official lepidopter install guides that we support running custom experiments via lepdiopter and there is no clear plan for how we should support this or if we should support this.

Some speculations (i.e. I have no hard evidence to support these claims, but based on interactions with people and some less strong evidence I find them quite probable)

  1. 99.9% of the people that download and install lepidopter are downloading and installing it because they want to run "OONI Probe"

  2. People that are using lepidopter for running their own custom tests are probably better off using something else that doesn't come with a auto-updater and want to do customisations of the image.

  3. Most power users that want 2. actually end up making their own lepidopter look-alike (example: Venezuela Inteligente) since the degree of customisation possible in lepidopter is not flexible enough and is error prone.

What is the problem anyways?

  1. People are confused by the fact that to run OONI Probe on raspberry pi they need to download a thing that is called lepidopter

  2. The name lepidopter itself is not the most simple. I have had countless conversations on the telephone with partners that went something like this:

Me: Now open your browser and connect to lepidopter.local Them: Lepi-what? Me: lepidopter.local, L-E-P-I-D-O-P-T-E-R Them: It's doesn't work Me: Can you spell it for me Them: L-E-P-T-I-D-O-P-T Me: Wait, there is a typo there, try this Them: It still doesn't work Me: Goes through all the troubleshooting URLs in: https://ooni.torproject.org/install/lepidopter/#troubleshooting-service-discovery, channeling my inner spirit to avoid cursing the day we picked this name

  1. People find in general the name confusion and it's unclear the relation it has with OONI and OONI Probe. See: https://twitter.com/craftNeui/status/909425924172546048 and more.

  2. It's important to build trust to consolidate all our projects under the OONI brand

What is irrelevant/out of scope

  1. What Lepidopter could be in the distant future where it runs even on washing machines

  2. What Lepidopter could be in the distant future where it adds support for netflix and home automation

  3. The fact that people are using Lepidopter in ways that we don't officially support (ex. ORG for Blocked.org) and are risking breaking their fleet when we push an over-zealous update

  4. What features we could be adding that would require N amount of development work to support 1-3.

What matters

The Lepidopter name is confusing. Users install Lepidopter to run OONI Probe, therefore the only reasonable thing is to call it OONI Probe.

bassosimone commented 7 years ago

My opinions on this:

  1. I think renaming the image distributed by OONI for OONI's sake is clearly a smart move in light of the issues that uses have had with the name. FTR, in the past we renamed libight to measurement-kit after @hellais and I noticed that people were not able to spell it correctly.

  2. I think the repository name can even stay lepidopter (or perhaps ooni-lepidopter if we want to make it more clear the association with OONI): as @agrabeli says, it is not a user facing product, so it is unlikely that the name given to scripts will have an impact on users' understanding

  3. it would be interesting to have the feature that we can configure the network name, because apparently typing lepidopter is a thing creating issues to users; I guess it should be configurable and that when building an image for OONI it should be configured to be ooni.local

  4. [later I also added:] in the end, is just a name for a piece of software that it does not seem we're actively developing anymore, so, honestly, it would probably not change much, whether we rename it or not, and I would be more happy if instead we could find energies to define a roadmap for the next version.

elioqoshi commented 7 years ago

Agreed with @agrabeli, we are bikeshedding over this (although I enjoyed the extensive analysis of @hellais ).

I think the repository name can even stay lepidopter (or perhaps ooni-lepidopter if we want to make it more clear the association with OONI): as @agrabeli says, it is not a user facing product, so it is unlikely that the name given to scripts will have an impact on users' understanding

I think we should rename it sooner or later as it might be confusing for new contributors. Doesn't need to be instant though.

So let's wrap it up and just incubate it within the OONI Probe sub-brand?

anadahz commented 7 years ago

@anadahz sure, there is opportunity, but are there concrete plans? I mean, is there a roadmap of something concrete enough to justify lepidopter as standalone platform?

@bassosimone lepidopter has been used as a standalone platform way before for a number of public and private projects. The first known official public release with the name lepidopter was referenced almost 4 years ago - December 2013. Time and availability define the progress and the milestones of the roadmap for the lepidopter distribution, but for sure is not a dead project.

anadahz commented 7 years ago

I think we are over-engineering this.

Lepidopter runs OONI Probe, therefore it is OONI Probe. As such, it only makes sense to call it OONI Probe.

Calling it anything else is not only confusing, but it is also extremely misleading. It implies that it is different software, when actually it is not.

Whatever scripts exist around OONI Probe in "Lepidopter" are irrelevant to users. They care about OONI Probe, which is designed to measure censorship. They don't care about the scripts that make OONI Probe run on hardware platforms (or any other platform, for that matter).

@agrabeli

In a similar way perhaps we should name OONI Probe a system which uses iOS or *nix distribution s when it is solely used to run ooniprobe?

Whatever scripts exist around OONI Probe in "Lepidopter" are irrelevant to users. They care about OONI Probe, which is designed to measure censorship. They don't care about the scripts that make OONI Probe run on hardware platforms (or any other platform, for that matter).

The same applies to any other distribution out there that supports running ooniprobe.

hellais commented 7 years ago

The first known official public release with the name lepidopter was referenced almost 4 years ago - December 2013.

It's unclear to me how that is even possible, given the fact that the first commit (of a 100 line shell script) is in May 2014: https://github.com/TheTorProject/lepidopter/commit/52cf01245e7e58f4ed407fd439b285225ef4a6cd. Did you create time-travel?

anadahz commented 7 years ago

It's unclear to me how that is even possible, given the fact that the first commit (of a 100 line shell script) is in March 2014: 52cf012. Did you create time-travel?

Initial commit Lepidopter - anadahz committed on Dec 4, 2013

hellais commented 7 years ago

Anyways this thing is starting to take a ridiculous direction. Lepidopter IS OONI Probe. Lepidopter is not a platform. If you think otherwise, what would happen if we were to remove ooniprobe from lepidopter? What would be left? Debian....

I think I summed up all the reasoning in a fairly reasonable way in my comment above.

@anadahz you are the only one that is failing to see this and everybody else agrees.

I am going to say there is rough consensus to move forward with this renaming strategy and I suggest we do it together with the rest of the renamings and website revamping scheduled.

hellais commented 7 years ago

Side comment. This project has been basically dormant for so much time and now we are spending an insane amount of time discussing a trivial thing as it's name.

screen shot 2017-09-18 at 18 23 19

Imagine if instead of spending all this time discussing this trivial matter, that everybody agrees on, we spent it actually making OONI Probe better?

Just a thought...

darkk commented 7 years ago

@anadahz you are the only one that is failing to see this and everybody else agrees.

HÄNDE HOCH! FORMAL LOGIC POLICE!

darkk commented 7 years ago

My opinion on this flame-capable matter is:

IMHO user will not be confused by name "lepidopter" that is mentioned in the documentation as the name of Debian derivative.

Bikeshedding must go on!

hellais commented 7 years ago

I am sorry for having gotten a bit worked up in this ticket and having replied with a bit of an unfriendly tone 🙏

I think that to some extent this got in the way of properly explaining what I was proposing.

I perfectly agree with what @darkk says in the above and I apologise if that was not clear in my previous responses.

The goal of this is just to reduce friction in how users learn about lepidopter and use it. That is to say:

Again sorry for not having been clearer.

@anadahz would this work for you?

adquadratum commented 6 years ago

Elio I have some information to share about my install of Lepidopter in Canada.  What is the best way to do that?

 

Greg Rudy

 

Sent: Friday, September 15, 2017 at 12:59 PM From: "Elio Qoshi" notifications@github.com To: TheTorProject/lepidopter lepidopter@noreply.github.com Cc: Subscribed subscribed@noreply.github.com Subject: [TheTorProject/lepidopter] Change name to OONI Pi (#101)

Lepidopter is quite confusing as a name and not having the OONI brand as part of it, distances it from OONI. Calling it OONI Pi would make more sense as it has brand consistency, is a short name and sounds phonetically great (ooniepie)

What do you think?

— You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub, or mute the thread.

 

anadahz commented 6 years ago

Elio I have some information to share about my install of Lepidopter in Canada. What is the best way to do that?

@adquadratum You could share this information by opening a new issue: https://github.com/TheTorProject/lepidopter/issues/new

If you would like to do this in private please use one of the contact methods mentioned in: https://github.com/TheTorProject/lepidopter/issues/new

anadahz commented 5 years ago

I'm going to close this issue as wontfix. The name of this distribution is around for so long to rename it.

elioqoshi commented 5 years ago

You haven't addressed what @hellais asked you about and yet you move on and close the discussion? While the decision died down I don't think this is solely your decision @anadahz to take.

anadahz commented 5 years ago

@elioqoshi thanks for your reply, please feel free to reopen this issue if there is any constructive feedback.