Suggestions for increasing useability

[gabrielesh]

Hi team, I'm a user very interested in understanding and getting Reprozip (or at least Reprounzip) to work, and I've run into several challenges that I believe could be addressed with clearer documentation. If my questions don't make sense, I hope they will at least reveal where there exists confusion. For context, I am someone who plays around on the command line, but I don't code regularly. Here are the questions that have arisen for me so far:

• It was not clear to me when skimming the Readme documentation that the .rpz files needed to be separately downloaded before running Reprounzip. Why is this? Can you both explain and made explicit 1) that it must be downloaded and 2) where the file should be downloaded in relationship to the GitHub files (i.e., should bash-count.rpz be downloaded into the bash-count directory or outside of it? my guess is outside based on an error message I received).
• From where should the suggested code snippets be run? i.e., I assume that one needs to be in the same directory as the .rpz file or give a full directory path. This may be obvious to those who work regularly on the command line, but it will not be obvious to most researchers I work with.
• The error message "-bash: dot: command not found" led me to guess that I needed to install open source graph software in order to run the visualization of the bash provenance. It would be useful to warn users about this.

I think that if these examples are designed to encourage on-boarding by those who do not work every day on the command line, they could use just a bit more scaffolding. I would be happy to respond to further questions, and would welcome answers as well, since I have yet to successfully unzip anything and have now spend several hours on this. I am hoping to highlight Reprozip in a talk I will give in a week, but will want to have successfully run it at least once before then.