Misleading terminology in UI: "Active" or "Unpaused"

(This may be too minor. If anyone thinks it’s not necessary to make any change, I can definitely understand as well.)

This thought started with the discussion @ashb and I had at https://github.com/apache/airflow/pull/14306#discussion_r579506519 . So the definition of active in an Airflow DAG context is “Whether that DAG was seen on the last DagBag load”.

However, on the other hand, in some scenarios of Airflow, active is used equivalently to UN-paused, like the home page.

To avoid potential confusion in terminology usage, shall we consider changing Active in home page to something like unpaused (or a better word).

Again, it’s minor to me, and would be happy to close this if most folks find it ok as it is now.

[XD-DENG]

Thanks everyone for your inputs!

What I would propose is:

Let’s change the “internal” term is_active to something else. It brings two benefits:

• to avoid the potential confusion
• better represent what it really means (“Whether that DAG was seen on the last DagBag load”).

Candidates can be something like is_active -> is_present.

May you please:

• share if you think it’s necessary to do this, or it’s too minor and you think we can live with it.
• if we do this, do you think is_present is a good replacement? or any other suggestion?

Thanks!

[potiuk]

I just tried to describe the current status in #22025 based on confused user discussion #21864 . And there are far too many “yes this is confusing” there.

I have another proposal how to solve it. MINOR and "super-simple.

How about we simply rename “Active” to “Unpaused” in the UI? This is, what it is, there is no particular reason to name the tab “Active” because it’s meaning is “Unpaused” really. We could come up with another name as well “Schedulable” ?