soroban-cli: refers to 'stellar asset contract' as 'token'

[leighmcculloch]

What version are you using?

9615897

❯ soroban version
soroban 0.9.4 (v0.9.5-70-g9615897821492671f951169f8f442d69cafb3d81)
soroban-env 0.0.17 (eb5a9ba053a7b64a8eff605db625525378f7bea0)
soroban-env interface version 85899345977
stellar-xdr 0.0.17 (39904e09941046dab61e6e35fc89e31bf2dea1cd)
xdr next (65afa63b7f52c898143ebbe9541ef91fcf290ade)

What did you do?

❯ soroban lab -h
Experiment with early features and expert tools

Usage: soroban lab <COMMAND>

Commands:
  token  Wrap, create, and manage token contracts
  xdr    Decode xdr

❯ soroban lab token -h
Wrap, create, and manage token contracts

Usage: soroban lab token <COMMAND>

Commands:
  wrap  Deploy a token contract to wrap an existing Stellar classic asset for smart contract usage
  id    Compute the expected contract id for the given asset

What did you expect to see?

Instructions about deploying and interacting with a stellar asset contract for a stellar asset.

What did you see instead?

  token  Wrap, create, and manage token contracts

Discussion

Quite a few releases ago we stopped referring to the stellar asset contract as the token contract.

There are two distinct but related concepts in Soroban:

1. token interface;
2. and, the stellar asset contract.

The stellar asset contract implements the token interface for all stellar assets.

Contract developers can create their own contracts that implement the token interface.

The CLI provides a confusing interface because it mixes this terminology, and uses terms that don't exactly parallel the XDR or SDK. We should make these things more consistent.

A few issues:

• The CLI refers to wrapping and creating as if there are two distinction actions. However there is only one action.
• The CLI refers to the stellar asset contract at a high level as 'token'.
• The CLI uses the term 'wrap' to describe an action where no new token is being created, a contract for an existing token (the stellar asset) is being deployed.

[stellarsaur]

There could definitely be some confusion with the terminology surrounding token and wrap. Perhaps we could rename the token command: soroban lab sac ... or soroban lab contract .... Also could consider renaming wrap to something clearer, like create: soroban lab sac create ... or soroban lab contract create ....

Of course, the help text would need to be updated to be clearer as well. Open to discussion on this.

[leighmcculloch]

I'd suggest modifying these commands to be:

❯ soroban asset -h
Work with Stellar Assets.

Usage: soroban asset <COMMAND>

Commands:
  deploy Deploy the asset contract for an asset.
  address Compute the expected contract address for the given asset.

❯ soroban xdr -h
Work with XDR.

Usage: soroban xdr <COMMAND>

Commands:
...

cc @willemneal for input.

Note that the following issue will result in the contents of this XDR command being replaced, so we don't need to spend much effort on that:

• soroban-cli: replace lab xdr subcommand with embedding the stellar-xdr cli #1018

[willemneal]

@leighmcculloch I'm all for this change. Just wondering if it's best under the contract subcommand since it is a contract.

[leighmcculloch]

I think you're right. In fact we don't even need unique commands for these. In the future there will be other built in contracts, so we should present this in a way that the sac is just another contract type, one of many, that can be deployed.

Maybe:

soroban contract deploy wasm --file ...

soroban contract deploy asset --asset ABC:G...

soroban contract deploy asset --asset native

The id command for that gives the user a contract is for a given asset would be useful for any contract too. So maybe that could be separate command:

soroban contract id asset ...

[janewang]

Remove lab, rename token to asset. Please comment on this for your thoughts.

[leighmcculloch]

At minimum, and rename wrap to deploy.