Table of contents
CoApp aims to create a vibrant Open Source ecosystem on Windows by providing the technologies needed to build a complete community-driven Package Management System, along with tools to enable developers to take advantage of features of the Windows platform.
CoApp intends to:
1) Provide a specification for package types and how applications are packaged, so that they can behave themselves in a common ecosystem.
2) Provide tools to make packaging easier
3) Shallow-fork a lot of OSS projects to provide clean, well-maintained Windows binaries
4) provide tools to make shallow-forking & maintaining packages easier
5) a user experience and a service that will allow end-users to manage their installed packages trivially (including updating...etc)
6) a specification for metadata so that any publisher who conforms to the package specification can build and distribute packages using via the client tools (5)
7) binary and source packages of applications and libraries forked in (3)
CoApp Presentation from Garrett Serack on Vimeo.
Interesting Factiods:
- Yes, Microsoft is involved--to the extent that they pay me (Garrett) to work on CoApp full time. They don't get to call the shots, nor do they own the project. The copyrights belong to me and the other contributors to the project.
- You can find the Team and Mailinglist hosted on Launchpad
- My CoApp presentation at OSCON turned out well; the audio was nice and clear. I'll pair it with the deck and post it early next week once I'm back in my office.
- In case you hadn't noticed it on the Launchpad project site, all the code we are writing is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license. All code that is shallow-forked will remain under the license of the originating project.
News:
[Jul 16/2010] We've been busy. The coding has begun for the CoApp tools and engine
[Apr 16/2010] Added a page about the CoApp Design and Development summit on May 13/14.
[Apr 16/2010] Added a section for anyone to add user stories/scenarios. Please, tell us what you want!
[Apr 15/2010] Created a CoApp-Announcements mailing list. Status updates and Announcements only. Open Registration.
[Apr 13/2010] Started an FAQ Page and a Package Priorities page
[Apr 12/2010] The Project governance page is up. If you want to contribute (design, code, etc) you should read the governance info and complete the CLA.
[Apr 10/2010] The Wiki is live again.
[Apr 5/2010] "Timing has a lot to do with the outcome of a rain dance." Outage Notice: Turns out we're moving our lab this week, and I'll have to offline the CoApp wiki for a couple days (Wednesday->Friday). I'll put up a redirect page during the move.
[Apr 5/2010] If you want to be able to modify pages; you need to have 'contributor' access (by default, newly registered wiki users have 'viewer' permissions, and can only comment on pages). Drop a note onto the mailing list (simply to validate that you're human) to get contributor access.
[Apr 3/2010] If you want to comment (or even see the comments) on a page, please sign-up and log-in, and there is a comment button on the bottom of each page.
[Apr 2/2010] I'm working on getting OpenID authentication working for the wiki, but the version of the plugin I have isn't new enough for the version of the wiki I'm running.
Quick Links:
For some background about what this is all about, see What is CoApp?
The project page at Launchpad can be found at http://launchpad.net/coapp
The team mailing list is on Launchpad, and can be found at https://launchpad.net/~coapp-developers
To get started, register on this wiki and the launchpad site.
If you need to get a hold of me: garretts [at] microsoft [.] com
Guiding Principles:
#1: Design the system&specs to do the correct thing, even if it's not the way used to be done.
#2: Favor strictness to spec vs relaxed rules. Consistency will pay out in the end.
Current state of the project:
Well, we're just getting started. Since I wanted to to this entirely as open source, and as an open process, I haven't produced any code or specs yet. I have however spent alot of time gathering information and doing some proof-of-concept work in the lab.
So, there is nothing to play with yet, there is certainly things we can do.
I'll be starting to sketch out the blueprints over the next couple of weeks, and any comments are certianly welcome.