Definitions & terms

[SteveLasker]

A set of definitions & terms to be used across repos. References can be made as [fingerprint](./definitions-terms.md/#fingerprint)

[SteveLasker]

@samuelkarp, an extraction of terms from #6

[samuelkarp]

Thanks for putting this together. I have a few suggestions, then hopefully we can get this merged and iterate from there.

[samuelkarp]

the artifact is right most element of the namespace

This isn't really accurate. The right-most element of the name is still just part of the name, and can resolve to anything the registry stores. This could be an index, an image manifest, or an artifact.

We should probably include a definition for a name, referencing the distribution spec:

The rules for a repository name are as follows:

1. A repository name is broken up into path components. A component of a repository name MUST begin with one or more lowercase alpha-numeric characters. Subsequent lowercase alpha-numeric characters are OPTIONAL and MAY be separated by periods, dashes or underscores. More strictly, it MUST match the regular expression [a-z0-9]+(?:[._-][a-z0-9]+)*.
2. If a repository name has two or more path components, they MUST be separated by a forward slash ("/").
3. The total length of a repository name, including slashes, MUST be less than 256 characters.

[SteveLasker]

This looks like the definition I wrote for repo, below.

[samuelkarp]

Can you remove this sentence?

When referencing artifacts, within a fully qualified reference, the artifact is right most element of the namespace, combined with the :tag.

[SteveLasker]

Lets have this conversation on Monday.

[samuelkarp]

Same comment as above about naming; should be broken out into a separate definition that comes from the distribution spec.

[samuelkarp]

I'd remove this as namespaces are not a specific part of the definition of a name. You could include a definition of a "path component", since that's the term used in the distribution spec.

[SteveLasker]

Are you suggesting we use the term path, instead of namespace? That makes sense. Although, I'd still want to separate the element that doesn't include the artifact name.
Here's the larger post that goes into more detail:
Registry Names, Namespaces, Images, Artifacts & Tags

[samuelkarp]

"path component" is the terminology used in the distribution spec, so I would bias toward that. I don't really see that we need to describe all of the components of a name, though. It's not clear to me that we need a distinction between "namespaces" and "images", for example. One of the goals of this project is for the signatures to be independent of the location of the images/artifacts, and right now the name is synonymous with the location.

[SteveLasker]

A good conversation for Monday as well.
The issue is what I describe here: https://stevelasker.blog/2020/02/17/registry-namespace-repo-names/

Potential life cycle of the web:v1.0 artifact. In the following example, the same web:v1.0 artifact is copied across several repos, using different namespaces, as it makes it way through production, to an archived state.

1. org.example.com/dev/blue-team/web:v1.0
2. org.example.com/staging/marketing/web:v1.0
3. org.example.com/prod/marketing/web:v1.0
4. org.example.com/archive/marketing/web:v1.0

We need a way for the web:1.0 artifact to move between repos, while maintaining the same signature.
We've already discussed moving across registries:
org-archive.example.com/marketing/web:v1.0

What I'd like to accomplish is defining the path as a separate element of the artifact. An artifact can move between paths without changing.

I've made some changes to refer to path as the named element, with namespace/sub-namespace as the elements of a path. It just seemed weird to call it path/sub-path and we use namespace quite frequently.