My two shillings: I came to Airflow knowing what a DAG was in the math sense, and I was a bit surprised to see it used for Airflow. Our DAGS aren't technically DAGs and haven't been since task retries were introduced, maybe even before that. I'd support what Daniel said. IFF we're going to change the name, I think "Workflow" works better than trying to redefine an existing known term, but honestly I would advocate for switching to using "Dag" as a proper noun with some little note somewhere that the name comes from DAG but we've since evolved past that strict definition.
- ferruzzi ________________________________ From: Jens Scheffler <j_scheff...@gmx.de.INVALID> Sent: Tuesday, February 18, 2025 2:03 PM To: dev@airflow.apache.org Subject: RE: [EXT] Airflow should deprecate the term "DAG" for end users CAUTION: This email originated from outside of the organization. Do not click links or open attachments unless you can confirm the sender and know the content is safe. AVERTISSEMENT: Ce courrier électronique provient d’un expéditeur externe. Ne cliquez sur aucun lien et n’ouvrez aucune pièce jointe si vous ne pouvez pas confirmer l’identité de l’expéditeur et si vous n’êtes pas certain que le contenu ne présente aucun risque. Wow what a discussion thread. Was reading it and...: I am okay to clean up docs and agree to the others that we should NOT change code interfaces. For the marketing part I need to repeat: (Almost) Everybody touching Airflow needs an explanaition what "DAG" means. Changing the acronym to have another meaning for DAG still needs an explanaition. For me reanming the meaning of the Acronym does not bring any benefit, also not Marketing. I have also seen multiple times challenges for teams in our area (even outside ML) who wanted to iterate over results and we needed to implement complexer multi-DAG structures to make this possible because of DAG. If we would go in the direction as Jarek pitched (which might be earliest 3.5 or 4.0) that a non-DAG workflow would be made possible (I'd LOVE this!) then I would strongly opt for renaming it to "Workflow". Because everybody understands (or thinks he understands) what it is and DAG might be one implementation of this. So my conclusion is I am not for changing the meaning of DAG. On 18.02.25 19:54, Jarek Potiuk wrote: > Ech. I would love so much if we could correct sent email same way we can > correct messages in Slack :D > > On Tue, Feb 18, 2025 at 7:50 PM Daniel Standish > <daniel.stand...@astronomer.io.invalid> wrote: > >> damnit --- meant to say is *not* strictly speaking .... >> >> On Tue, Feb 18, 2025 at 10:46 AM Daniel Standish < >> daniel.stand...@astronomer.io> wrote: >> >>> Yeah I also disagree with code changes here. This thread went in an >>> unexpected direction since I last poked my head in :) >>> >>> My thought is just in docs I would de-emphasize the mathy part of this. >>> We can say a DAG is airflow's model for a collection of tasks that run, >>> typically on a schedule. We could say further add, e.g. in *one place* >>> somewhere, that the name DAG originated from a mathematical concept >> called >>> directed acyclic graph. But I do not think we need to go revising >> history >>> about that and providing new words for the acronym. >>> >>> But it has always been the reality that an Airflow DAG is strictly >>> speaking a directed acyclic graph. It's something different. We do >> forbid >>> cycles. And it does contain the info needed to construct a graph of the >>> tasks. But it's much richer than that concept as well. >>> >>> I don't think we really need to go much further than that. But I'd also >>> be in support of writing `dag` or `dags` in docs instead of DAG or DAGs >>> because it's ugly to do so, and unnecessary, and it invokes that mathy >>> concept that is both confusing and inadequate. >>> >>> >>> --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@airflow.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@airflow.apache.org
