[tor-project] Onion sites vs onion services vs hidden services

Damian Johnson atagar at torproject.org
Thu May 5 17:28:06 UTC 2016


Personally I don't care what we call them, but I *do* care about
consistency. Stem continues to call them Hidden Services because
nobody has offered to take ownership of renaming all the things. For
instance the tor, spec, and website codebases still heavily use the
old name...

torspec$ grep -i 'hidden service' ./* | wc -l
105

webwml$ grep -iR 'hidden service' ./* | wc -l
369

tor$ grep -iR 'hidden service' ./* | wc -l
1054

... and this doesn't count the dozens of other codebases we have,
aliasing torrc parameters, aliasing controller methods/events, etc.
Personally I really like Sebastian's idea - hidden services are the
name of the old thing, and onion services are the new thing. This
avoids a lot of headaches.

That said, renaming is certainly doable. It'll just take someone
interested in investing days to hunt down all the old things and make
pull requests. The one course of action I *do* object to is saying
"we've renamed these to Onion Services" without actually changing all
the things. That's just confusing for our users.

Cheers! -Damian


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