feat(gui): a way to support the project, and a window that states its licence

[donislawdev]

Two commits, one theme: the window gains the two things it could not say before - a way to support the project, and what licence it came under.

The support link

A Donate button in the title bar, in the one strip both modules share. Pressing it hands an address to the shell, which starts the browser the user already chose.

This is the first control in the application that leads off the machine, and the product promises it never talks to the internet. That promise still holds - nothing here opens a socket, the browser is what connects - but a QA tool that makes such a promise has to be the one to raise the distinction rather than let somebody discover it. So the tooltip names the address before the button is pressed, and the README and the FAQ say the same in prose. The shorter claims in the footer, on the home page and on the download page are deliberately left alone: they stay true, and qualifying a bullet point ruins the bullet point.

ExternalLinks exposes named destinations rather than an open-this-string method. UseShellExecute runs whatever it is handed, so an address assembled from a dropped file, a recent target or a preset would be a way to start anything. A guard stops a later caller reintroducing that.

The network guard caught this before any new test did, which is exactly what it is for: it did not refuse, it asked for a register entry with a reason. Its own header turned out to contradict its register, offering a URL-opening shell verb as an example of the forbidden list while UseShellExecute has always sat in the watched one with no entry against it. The register was right and the prose was stale, so the prose is fixed rather than quietly worked around.

The About window

The command line has always answered this. chrono license prints the build, the copyright, the SPDX identifier, the warranty disclaimer and every bundled component - between them the Appropriate Legal Notices GPL-3 section 0 describes. The window had none of it, with the version buried in the title bar, and the window is the default way in.

This is not a licence requirement and should not be read as one. Both packages already ship LICENSE and THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md beside the executable, which is what MIT and GPL sections 4 and 6 ask for, and section 5(d) exempts an original program whose interfaces do not display such notices. Nobody was owed this window. A reader was.

One source of truth, three times over:

• the component list comes from the core (chrono license --components), whose register is compiled in from the same file the release SBOM is generated from
• the copyright is read from the assembly, so it comes from Directory.Build.props - the line a test on the Rust side already compares against the core's constant
• the SPDX identifier, the one fact with no home on this side, is mirrored against Cargo.toml by a test

The core prints its whole notice ABOVE the component register, so the first build of this window showed every line of it twice - once in its own words and once raw. That is cut at the first group heading rather than by widening the command-line contract with a flag for one caller, and a mirror test pins the heading against the Rust source. When the heading is missing the whole text is shown: an empty component list would be this tool claiming there is nothing third-party inside it, which is the one answer it must never give by accident.

What the renders caught

Three faults that reasoning would not have found, each fixed on a screenshot rather than an argument: the spacing scale is uniform on four sides, so blocks carrying a vertical margin also indent and the first draft had three different left edges; the absent-file line said the same long sentence twice under itself; and the notice appeared twice, as above. Vertical-only gaps are now named resources.

WPF refuses to set Owner on a window that has never been shown, so ownership moved from the constructor to Show, where the owner is on screen by definition. A red build test found that.

Checks

• gates 12/12, Rust 435 unchanged, C# 392 → 404
• screenshots before and after the title-bar change are identical byte for byte below the bar, with the bar itself differing as the canary
• six revert probes, each watched failing: the address, the failure path, an address chosen outside the links file, the scan canary, the window title, and the network register entry
• the background guard's canary raised from two windows to three, so it notices the newest one

Known limits, stated rather than left to be found

• the failure path of both link buttons is proven to the point where TryOpen returns false. That a dialog then appears is not verified live, which would need a machine with no browser associated with https
• the About window says where LICENSE is and offers the online copy - it does not render the licence text itself. Section 0 asks that a reader be told how to view a copy, not that one be displayed

🤖 Generated with Claude Code