Investigate CWL for computing instructions

[mih]

CWL (https://www.commonwl.org) appears to be an excellent candidate for compute specifications. It has

• well-documented https://www.commonwl.org/v1.2
• a rich software ecosystem (https://www.commonwl.org/tools/) with lots of language support, job execution and submission helpers, web-focused visualization that promise versatile consumption avenues
• it goes substantially beyond the expressiveness of a datalad run record
• it is readily extensible with versatile (and custom) metadata https://www.commonwl.org/tools/#specs
• dedicated and comprehensive support for describing the execution of CLI tools https://www.commonwl.org/v1.2/CommandLineTool.html
• framework for provenance capture https://cwltool.readthedocs.io/en/latest/CWLProv.html
• the a various CWL generators, including one from a terminal command https://github.com/tom-tan/zatsu-cwl-generator

I would see too downsides to its adoption:

• complexity and dependencies (e.g. the CWL-from-cmd-generator is written in D)
• no direct windows support

[mih]

Closing. Continued in https://github.com/datalad/datalad-remake/issues/14