Rename Zinnia as checker-runtime to reduce cognitive load

[geomatrick]

Rename Zinnia as checker-runtime to reduce cognitive load

[bajtos]

@patrickwoodhead I see your point.

Maybe I am too attached to the current Zinnia brand, but I feel it's better to keep the current name.

• I still hope Zinnia can be useful and adopted outside of Checker nodes
• Zinnia is a name used by subnet builders only. Developers are used to have multiple tools with different names (rustc and cargo, node and npm, cd and ls and cp, etc.)

Let's discuss the practical aspects of renaming Zinnia.

User facing:

• zinnia run subnet/main.js - This is the command subnet builders use during local development. If we rename Zinnia to checker-runtime, would this become checker-runtime run subnet/main.js? That's a long one to type!
• zinniad - This is "zinnia daemon", the process running inside Checker nodes. This name is also shown in the list of applications running on user computers.
  I like the idea of renaming zinniad to checker-runtime 👍🏻

Rust crates:

• zinnia_runtime - This provides Rust API for running checker code inside Zinnia/Deno runtime. It bundles Deno bits with zinnia_libp2p, rusty-lassie, and other features specific to Zinnia.
• zinnia_libp2p - This is a Deno extension wrapping rust-libp2p and exposing it via JS APIs.
• zinnia - The CLI binary zinnia.
• zinniad - The daemon binary zinniad.

My proposal:

• Keep the repository name https://github.com/CheckerNetwork/zinnia.
• Keep the zinnia name for the CLI for local development.
• Keep publishing the zinnia crate to Crates.io, so that subnet builders can easily install it from source via cargo install zinnia.
• Rename zinniad binary to checker-runtime.
• Stop publishing the checker-runtime crate to Crates.io. We don't expect people to use the runtime daemon.

An alternative considered:

• We could extract the zinniad/checker-runtime code into a new repository CheckerNetwork/runtime. However, that would add too much friction to our development, as we would have to make most changes in two repositories (zinnia and runtime).

@juliangruber What's your opinion?

[juliangruber]

Given how much work this is, I don't see any value in performing this rename now. No user should really know about this project, and developers can handle the cognitive load.

Whether this project should become checker-runtime or not to me is a product question. If it's called checker-runtime, it's clear that this is the only runtime, and there's no competition. If we want to own the runtime, +1 to that. If we want to allow for growth through competition, -1. I believe that's also why Filecoin projects have bespoke names, and aren't called filecoin-x.