coapp-developers team mailing list archive

[ml@xxxxxxxxxxxx]

There were 3 topics I wanted to bring up for possible further discussion
while things are still in the planning stages.

The first was to ask that there would be a command line interface for any
tools that would be created.  Just read the post about cli command syntax,
so hopefully that topic's covered.  Thanks for making sure there's a
command line interface.  Doing things the Windows way doesn't necessarily
mean using a GUI.  I don't think preference for command line versus GUI is
operating system specific.  My guess is it has more to do with factors
like whether a person is better at learning visually (seeing a video of
how it's done) or text/orally (reading a manual) and how fast typing speed
is versus mouse clicking speed.  So, thanks for any command line
interfaces you can add to the project.  Also makes it easier to write
different GUI front-ends with different libraries to change look and feel
easily and use the command line tools to do the actual work.

I looked over the suggested commands for the CLI.  Just wanted to add the
suggestion that maybe there could be a way to abbreviate commands.  For
instance, you can type:
CoApp-cli install package_name
It might be nice if you could shorten commands as long as they're still
unique, so you could also type:
CoApp-cli i package_name
I like the part about wildcards with the package_name too.

Second topic, was about installing software.  I remember reading on the
wiki that the installer would use the MSI format.  Not that familiar with
the format (usually prefer zip files and tarballs).  However, can't help
wondering how applications like portable apps (programs that run on
removable drives or flash drives) will fit into the picture.  Removable
drives fill a nice niche between cloud computing and having everything
local to one machine.  You can take your programs and data with you
anywhere to any Windows system and work.  If the install program ends up
tying a program to the registry or expecting it to be on a particular
drive at all times, it'll make it difficult to use the applications
provided by CoAPP as portable apps.  It would be nice if CoAPP could host
portable apps alongside regular applications that tie in to the registry
and use helpful Windows features like defaulting file extensions to a
particular program.  Has any thought about how to handle a typical
portable app (a program that's meant to be installed to a flash drive or
removeable drive) within the project?

Third topic, I read through the governance information at:
http://coapp.org/Getting_Started/CoApp_Project_Governance
Would like to suggest adding one more community role, something possibly
between a user and contributer.  Is there any way to add a role for people
who want to contribute but may not want to work with the Contributor
License Agreement?  I think it may attract more Free and Open Source
software developers if you had another category for contribution listed. 
Since the libraries and programs the project is building are Open Source
and already covered by typical Open Source licenses, it wouldn't be that
much of a stretch to let developers contribute under an Open Source
licence rather than the Contributor License Agreement at the site. 
Personally, if I'm going to contribute patches to something that's
licensed under GNU GPL, I'll license my patches under the same GNU General
Public License just to avoid licensing conflicts.  I think if it's
possible to add one more category for developers who want to contribute to
the project, but use a compatible Open Source license instead, that would
attract more developers.  I'm not specifically thinking of the build tools
the CoApp project is working on, but for contributions to building the
Open Source itself and to patches needed to get the code to work on
Windows if it doesn't already.  Also, the most overlooked part of a
project is often documentation.  CoApp project members might need to come
up with documentation to explain how to get and install software that's
built by the CoApp project.  Might also be nice to store documentation
that project members come up with on how to work with some of these Open
Source applications that are being built (especially if it can be oriented
to Windows users specifically too).  Maybe something like a Creative
Commons license for contributing documentation would be a useful option
too.

Sincerely,
Laura