CIP-0059? | Terminology Surrounding Core Features

[JaredCorduan]

This informational CIP seeks to clarify the language around groups of features. At the very least, it provides some history.

[rphair]

To me this seems logically complete, with nothing extraneous or left out. I think this will help a lot of people like me who've been bewildered by the inconsistent nomenclature.

Because of these haphazard beginnings maybe it would help to include a "timeline" table (like your ledger era table but more complete) of all phases, ledger eras, intra-era hardforks, and changes to the consensus mechanism & ledger protocol so far (completed or in progress): since if this proposal is adopted it will make a lot of the writing around them incorrect retroactively.

I originally dismissed this idea because your proposed nomenclature is used throughout your own document, especially in the first big paragraph so it already includes most of the historical examples with the updated terms, in mostly chronological order.

But new SPOs, marketing & technical writers, and bloggers / vloggers would need something to refer to more easily. Generally these won't have the technical experience & presence of mind to line up all the proposed terms with things they've experienced. So I do think a timeline of all events characterised by those terms— from genesis up through the planned hard fork release dates before the end of 2022— would help the Cardano community and those beyond it.

Note I don't think such a timeline would need to be updated going forward in order to remain useful, especially since this document is mainly about the nomenclature itself and not the history. For that reason it might also be better, if including a timeline, to have it on a separate page.

[JaredCorduan]

Thank you @rphair , that is great feedback! I think your idea for an expanded table is fantastic. I'm not sure exactly what you mean by using a separate page, though. A separate markdown file, to live in this repository? A wiki page on the cardano-node repository?

I think you have something like this in mind (this is totally off the cuff, I forget the details around the Byron phase, etc think I got it).

Date	Phase	Era	Slot Number	Epoch Number	Protocol Version	Ledger Protocol	Consensus Mechanism	Notes
2017/09	Byron	Byron	0	0	0,0	-	Ouroboros Classic
2020/02	Byron	Byron	3801600	176	1,0	-	Ouroboros BFT
2020/07	Shelley	Shelley	4492800	208	2,0	TPraos	Ouroboros Praos
2020/12	Goguen	Allegra	16588800	236	3,0	TPraos	Ouroboros Praos
2021/03	Goguen	Mary	23068800	251	4,0	TPraos	Ouroboros Praos
2021/09	Goguen	Alonzo	39916975	290	5,0	TPraos	Ouroboros Praos
2021/10	Goguen	Alonzo	43372972	298	6,0	TPraos	Ouroboros Praos	intra-era hardfork
	Goguen	Babbage			7,0	Praos	Ouroboros Praos	Vasil HF

[rphair]

A separate markdown file, to live in this repository?

yes, that's what I meant... I think a relative link to a file in the same directory as this CIP README will also work on cips.cardano.org. As expected this has information going beyond the scope of the "ledger" so it makes more sense to include it in this CIP than replacing your earlier ledger table, unless you think otherwise.

The table itself is exactly what I was hoping for 🤩 although from other people's point of view it would be useful to have a Date column so they can line it up with other communications from these periods. (So people focus on the most relevant detail, which is the epoch / slot number, maybe it would be best to have an imprecise date: just month & year.)

[JaredCorduan]

yes, that's what I meant... I think a relative link to a file in the same directory as this CIP README will also work on cips.cardano.org. As expected this has information going beyond the scope of the "ledger" so it makes more sense to include it in this CIP than replacing your earlier ledger table, unless you think otherwise.

That sounds great to me! I'll need to do some digging to get all these details, but I agree that it sounds very helpful.

Date column ... just month & year.

That sounds great too!

[JaredCorduan]

(I updated the table to see what it would look like with dates and a notes column)

[rphair]

It all looks great, including the table 😎

I do think this will be an important reference document for writers & so also would like it to be easily found by nontechnical people looking for this subject. I don't know if the title Names surrounding features will stand out from a list of CIP titles in that regard (partly because of the nonliteral use of the word "surrounding"), whereas Names for Cardano episodic features would be more literal and specific.

But I also don't have a common synonym for "episodic" and any common synonym for "episodic feature" would leave us right back with the word "era" whose definition isn't clarified until inside the document 🤪 ... so I can't pin this down perfectly & hope the group as a whole can come up with a real winner of a title.

[KtorZ]

Shouldn't Babbage be part of Basho though 🤔 ?

[JaredCorduan]

It all looks great, including the table sunglasses

🎉

... Names for Cardano episodic features

I like that better! It somehow doesn't bother me that the "name for the names" isn't defined 😆 . I'm happy to got with whatever title folks think is the most helpful.

---

Shouldn't Babbage be part of Basho though thinking ?

I'd never though of it that way. 🤔 I was thinking about it as optimizations and ergonomics improvements for Plutus. I think of things like sidechains and Hydra as squarely within Basho.

[KtorZ]

Hydra is layer 2, so arguably, it'll never be part of any changes carried on the core protocol. 😊

I'd say that any update that relates to performance / scalability on the layer 1 is part of Basho. This includes Babbage's Plutus improvements, pipelining, and Leios later on.

[JaredCorduan]

I'd say that any update that relates to performance / scalability on the layer 1 is part of Basho. This includes Babbage's Plutus improvements, pipelining, and Leios later on.

@dcoutts do you have an opinion on this? Are we considering the Babbage era a part of Goguen or Basho?

[dcoutts]

I'd say that Babbage is pretty squarely within the Goguen era. All the ledger feature changes are about EUTxO and Plutus extensions.

There are some optimisations (like the VRF improvements that need a HF), but nothing that would really justify calling it Basho.

@JaredCorduan nice table, agree that's a good idea. If you include such a table, note that the consensus protocol did change in Babbage from "Ouroboros Praos (Transitional)" to plain "Ouroboros Praos" Sorry, I didn't read the table carefully. I see you've got a separate column for this. So yes that's fine.

[rdlrt]

Might be worth mentioning:

• Protocol version is not the same as Network Protocol Version? Not sure if it's something that can be mapped in this table, probably not because it's from networking layer between nodes?
• Perhaps a condition with link at the bottom to clarify about Protocol Versions in block header signify not the Protocol Version itself, but the maximum supported ledger-protocol-version for node?

[JaredCorduan]

• indeed, the "protocol version" is separate from the node-to-node and node-to-client versions. I'm happy to make a note of this, but I'd need help lining the node-to-x versions with this table (and indeed, it may not even line up at all).
• will do!

[JaredCorduan]

@rdlrt I added a commit to address these two points.

[SebastienGllmt]

Makes sense to me

[KtorZ]

@JaredCorduan We'll move this PR to review/last-check in the next CIP meeting (cc @mangelsjover). In the meantime, may you:

• Number the proposal as 59
• Rename the main file as README.md
• Move the files into a folder named CIP-0059
• Change the status to Active (we'll discuss that in the meeting, but this being an informational CIP pushed by the core to clarify existing terminology, I believe it can go as Active right away).

And, more of a personal suggestion regarding the title: what do you think of: Terminology Surrounding Core Features
(stressing the 'Core' part, which adds a bit of context for when the CIP will be listed in other places).

[KtorZ]

(sorry, didn't mean to close, Github UI just incentivized me to :|)

[JaredCorduan]

@KtorZ the main file is already named README.md. did you want the table moved, or was this just a checklist that I happened to have already completed one item? 😅

"Terminology Surrounding Core Features" sounds great to me!

[KtorZ]

It was more of a general checklist, but I genuinely thought it wasn't named README hence why I mentioned it. My bad 😶

[JaredCorduan]

It was more of a general checklist, but I genuinely thought it wasn't named README hence why I mentioned it. My bad no_mouth

whew, I'm always glad to see a bit of evidence that I haven't yet gone completely mad 😆