This file aims to explain some basic ideas behind the electronpass project. It will also explains the project structure and the wallet format.
Most important question is of course why. Passwords are essential part of our digital lives. Managing them however, is difficult. You can't remember every password if they are even slightly secure. The obvious thing to do is use a password manager. Not so obvious is which password manager to use. The ones that work everywhere (computer, phone, tablet..) are closed source payable products. There is nothing wrong with that, but we believe that there should always be an open source alternative. However, in the field of password managers there is no good open source alternative that would work on every platform and have user friendly interface. And that's the basic idea behind electronpass: open source, user friendly password manager.
So how will we achieve that? The basic idea is that there is a unified wallet format which can be used on all systems and all languages. The format is explained in detail in Data Definitions.md.
We will try to maintain the wallet format and evolve the definition as the time goes on. We will also try to maintain 3 applications:
- Desktop application written in c++ (electronpass-desktop),
- Android application written in Kotlin (electronpass-android),
- iOS application written in Swift.
The idea is all applications use libelectronpass-cpp as a library that will actually serialize the wallet file. Library is ideally statically linked. We are not making it a dynamic library is because of the problems with linking. Dynamic libraries are a great idea, but the execution is very, very bad (except on linux, they work exceptionally well there). At the end we would need to provide the dynamic library with every application, which means we are better of statically linking.
For now we don't think that anyone will try to contribute to the project since it's so small. But if you do (thank you), the general idea is: look at the manifesto, understand the wallet format and then contribute to one of the existing clients by fixing the issues, or write your own client. If you are writing your own look at the libelectronpass repository for some general guidelines for wallet format implementation.