Guidance on creating exec scripts

[nicolehoess]

As we expanded Kaiaulu CLI, we came up with several questions that might be of interest to other developers working on the CLI as well. Therefore, we will sumarize them here for further discussion. :)

1. Should we favor interfaces which perform larger analyses parts (e.g. the social smells example) or should we favor small interfaces with limited functionality (e.g. the mailing list downloader)?

2. For a parallelized analysis that uses multiple cores to analyse multiple time windows of history, for example, should we have an additional interface without parallelisation (to avoid potential device-specific parallelization issues)?

3. When analysing a project's history over several time windows, we can specify them explicitly or specify a window size and derive the windows automatically. Can one option be taken as default, e.g. taking the window size into account only if ranges are not provided?

4. If there are multiple similar functions, e.g. for constructing temporal file-based and temporal entity-based collaboration networks, should we have a single interface with one or more parameters or create separate interfaces (including some duplicate code)? If we opt for an interface with several parameters, should we pass them via a configuration file?

5. The outputs of some functions could be exported as tables, graphs, networks, etc. Which representation should we choose for the CLI?

6. When updating existing configuration files, e.g. to demonstrate a new CLI, should the existing parameter choices be overwritten or should we create a new configuration file?