Add aiida as CLI command

[edan-bainglass]

Per @giovannipizzi, aiida was considered originally as the CLI tool but clashed with the similarly named library, hence verdi was born. However, this appears to no longer be an issue (tested). I then propose to replace verdi with aiida. I argue that it would be difficult to argue against aiida being a clearer choice. verdi can still exist for legacy purposes, but perhaps for new users, aiida is the way? We could update our language everywhere to reflect this.

[mbercx]

[mbercx]

More seriously, I think having an additional aiida entry point to the CLI makes plenty of sense. Also don't see any objections to making this the default in the documentation. :)

[edan-bainglass]

Thanks @mbercx. I agree regarding the docs. I'll bring it up next AiiDA meeting. Sorry Verdi.

[sphuber]

To give some counterweight to this proposal: does the fact that the CLI is called verdi instead of aiida really cause any problems? I have only ever heard one person who thought it was a weird choice and found it counterintuitive. On the flipside, I think there is actually a potential benefit to having verdi instead of aiida. The name verdi provides a unique label to refer to the CLI. When talking about it, it is easy to refer to the CLI and everybody knows what you are talking about. If we were to change this for aiida, I can see potentially discussions becoming less obvious. Now when someone refers to "aiida", you are not immediately sure if it refers to the software as a whole, the Python API, or the CLI.

So, considering the, what I think, minimal advantages of switching to aiida, and the considerable amount of work for us and users to update all their scripts/docs, combined with the downside of introducing ambiguity, is this change worth it?

[sphuber]

Should this be converted to a feature-request issue instead perhaps?

[edan-bainglass]

Yes? We have perhaps one too many avenues for discussion. Note that @danielhollas mentioned we might want to Discourse this, which I'm fine with. I suppose we can do both?

[danielhollas]

The whole idea of Discourse was to centralize discussions. For feature requests that require extended discussions I'd say Discourse is better than GitHub issues.

@sphuber I think we should just close / lock the GitHub Discussions feature.

[sphuber]

Converting this to an issue was just to formally track it in Github. I am working on opening a Discourse discussion as that should indeed be the main venue for design discussions.

[sphuber]

I opened the discussion here: https://aiida.discourse.group/t/should-verdi-be-renamed-to-aiida-or-add-aiida-as-an-alias/406