Redesign of the Command-Line Edition

[Miquel 'Fire' Burns]

Since it seems anyone who uses this edition and asks about appears to not use the Firefox Edition, I'm wondering if we should try to make an effort to make this edition more standalone, like the online edition is currently? If so, how do we do it?

[tanstaafl]

Being that I'm not a programmer, my answer will be simplistic and general in nature, but...

It should use a well-defined (established? industry standard?) API, so that any other program could hook into it - feed it a password, and return the generated password.

Beyond that, I don't know...

[Miquel 'Fire' Burns]

Were you even using computers during the DOS days? (Or did you start at Windows 95, or 3.1 with it set to autostart anyway?)

[tanstaafl]

Oh, yeah - I did some fun stuff with batch files...

I think DOS was at about 3.1 when I first got into the game... well, whatever it was at in 1985...

[Eric H. Jung]

Tanstaafl- I think what Miquel is getting at is that the command-line edition already supports an "API" through the use of standard out and standard in. These are about as well-established of a standard "api" as you could hope for. There are certainly other standards which we could wrap around the core, such as COM, but I don't see the effort worth the limited payback.

Miquel- when you say "try to make an effort to make this edition more standalone", can you elaborate? In what ways do you see it as non-standalone right now?

[Miquel 'Fire' Burns]

Well, right now, you need to set some sort of settings when you run it, or it will only work with the defaults (which, currently, may not match other editions...), and uses the RDF format for storing settings anyway, which you need the Firefox Edition to create.

[tanstaafl]

Ok, so maybe just switch it to a standard text .conf file format... and it would be neat (but not necessary) if the Firefox extension supported exporting a single accounts settings to this format too...

[Miquel 'Fire' Burns]

I think the new XML format that's used on the desktop edition would be enough.

[Eric H. Jung]

I think the new XML format that's used on the desktop edition would be enough.

Yes, that sounds good. And with FF's debate over when/if to deprecate RDF support, the FF edition might need to convert to using XML instead of RDF sooner rather than later.

[Miquel 'Fire' Burns]

Who knows, if all goes well, switching to the XML format (as currently planned) may help with the fact that the select accounts appears out of order every time or something.

[Eric H. Jung]

It will help with that but other things, too, like sorting. It will make writing sorting code easier. However, converting the FF edition from RDF to XML is a ginormous undertaking--on the scale of internationalizing PasswordMaker like Mauro did. Worse yet, it's not a change/enhancement that most users will notice. So I could spend months on it and most people won't even realize anything changes between versions.

[Miquel 'Fire' Burns]

Yea, I know. Maybe make a branch for XML support at some point? At first, just work on getting it to be able to at least import and export in the new XML format, then we'll deal with having it use the format natively.

But first, finalize the XML format! Only Defaults and Settings are basically set in stone right now. (because that's all that the Desktop Edition supports)