Windows 10 will come with a command-line package manager

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/192950-windows-10-will-come-with-a-command-line-package-manager-much-to-the-lament-of-linux-users

by Systemic33 • 12 years ago

417 337 12 years ago

extremetech.com

Systemic33• 12 years ago

Will be interesting if this will be similar to linux with the possibility of community driven repositories alongside official repo's. Or if it's more of an admintool to do windows updates/windows store installs.

Edit: Apparently, it's also open source [1]

[1] https://github.com/OneGet/oneget

A_COMPUTER• 12 years ago

It says it uses the same package format at Chocolatey and you can even add their repos. I don't know if there's any caveats to this, but it's a very, very good sign. I am excited about this.

SwellJoe3• 12 years ago

As simple as it seems, this single failing has been my primary reason for outright dismissing Windows as a reasonable contender for server usage, no matter what else Microsoft might do to make it attractive for a variety of server tasks. A system that cannot be updated easily without human intervention is not a system that deserves a place in any data center.

alyx• 12 years ago

I take it you're not familiar with Windows Server...

asdfaoeu• 12 years ago

Considering a lot of the audience is Linux admins here what are you referring to?

SwellJoe3• 12 years ago

It's been nearly a decade since I managed any Windows servers. I'm more than willing to believe there are features of modern Windows systems that I don't know about. Perhaps you can fill me in on what I've been missing...I assume you're implying there is some equivalent to yum or apt-get on Windows that allows easily updating system and third-party packages from the command line without human intervention?

And, do most vendors make their software available through this mechanism? That would be a miraculous improvement over the couple dozen different update services that run on a Windows box (Java updater, Adobe updater, Apple updater, Oracle updater for VirtualBox, etc.), all of which have wildly variable reliability and are mostly impossible to script or automate. If those are gone from the Windows management experience, that'd be great.

sandGorgon2• 12 years ago

search for Microsoft SMS and SCCM - this is actually like a package manager + Puppet/Chef rolled into one.

Very expensive though and not good usability - but is far more sophisticated (with P2P downloading, tree structure repositories, etc.)

orbifold2• 12 years ago

Well I take it you have never maintained a 10k+ installation of Windows machines then? How do you imagine this is done? An army of sysadmins going from PC to PC and manually clicking through installation dialogues?

melling2• 12 years ago

I'm not a Windows user so maybe I'm way off, but wouldn't adding Cortana go much farther in getting people to upgrade?

How's the Kinect support in Windows? Quite honestly, Microsoft is only competing against itself. How many XP uses are still out there? A couple hundred couple hundred million? Give them a reason to get excited.

gum_ina_package2• 12 years ago

It seems like you haven't paid much attention to the leaks and rumors out there... Cortana is 100% going to be in Windows 10 from the looks of it. Also, this package manager is designed to get the people MS needs excited the most - hardcore power users like us.

melling2• 12 years ago

That's what I said. I'm not a Windows users. I follow a little Windows phone and some Surface 3 news.

UnoriginalGuy3• 12 years ago

This isn't aimed at consumers. This is aimed squarely at businesses. Cortana won't excite them as much as further automation which decreases workload and by extension costs.

wfjackson3• 12 years ago

http://www.theverge.com/2014/9/30/6876177/windows-10-cortana...

amaks2• 12 years ago

Regarding Kinect support in Windows -- is it IKinect, or Kinect.NET?

gum_ina_package2• 12 years ago

This could be awesome, especially if it can integrate with the Windows Store. Maybe even your XBox/WP too?

mherkender• 12 years ago

This reminds me of that time that Microsoft caught up to a competitor years too late to have any impact.

UnoriginalGuy3• 12 years ago

If Windows Server or Exchange weren't a massive continued success you might have a point. As it is you just sound pathetic.

http://www.tannerhelland.com/4993/microsoft-money-updated-20...

72deluxe8• 12 years ago

We were looking to replace our ancient Exchange server with an Open-Source equivalent but nothing has a feature-parity. Nothing has the widespread support as Exchange: ability to fetch on all mobiles, widespread desktop protocol support (not just IMAP but you know, that Exchangey binary protocol), a web interface etc. etc. etc.

It just is a massive continued success, although from my migration from 2003 to 2010 and subsequent pain to 2010 SP2, I didn't find it successful or painless - I don't miss maintaining it.

I think a lot of folks on here look at the world through very narrow glasses where they write Python web-apps under Linux, or work in SOHO environments that rely on external email providers; they don't come across the all-pervasive Windows desktop culture. They never need to touch Active Directory, let alone understand what it is or why they'd need it, and never have to touch an Exchange server or roll-out applications across an array of desktop machines.

It is a pity because some end up making short-sighted narrow-FOV comments about Microsoft and Windows etc. that are unnecessary. Just because we don't use a system, we shouldn't assume that nobody else does.

craigvn• 12 years ago

Yes, Microsoft the minnow company nobody heard of.

cbd19843• 12 years ago

IBM's the same way.

Doesn't mean it will forever be relevant beyond a small niche.

kolev• 12 years ago

One-up OS X!

TheSoftwareGuy• 12 years ago

Awesome. Maybe I'll end up buying a windows machine sometime soon.

jqm• 12 years ago

Someone at work told me Windows 10 is also going to have virtual desktops. Haven't verified.

I did play with a release preview of 10. It was actually OK in a brief 5 minute survey. I won't ever use it for day to day stuff, (I'm a Linux user), but its nice to see them at least appearing to make an effort. I think most of us in the field are at some level negatively impacted when Microsoft engages in evil/stupid behavior, so it's nice when they come out with something good which they do from time to time.

fetbaffe3• 12 years ago

How to Use Virtual Desktops in Windows 10 http://www.howtogeek.com/197625/how-to-use-virtual-desktops-...

robomartin2• 12 years ago

If Windows 10 was built on top of Linux I'd get a lot more excited.

I have to use Windows for the myriad of engineering tools that are not available under any other OS, for example, SolidWorks, Altium Designer, various embedded toolsets, etc. And, while I've been using PC's (and Macs and Linux) since they came on the scene I hate, hate, hate the DOS or technically DOS-like underbelly of the beast.

I know it is a ridiculous idea. It would break everything, including their profitable corporate platforms.

Yes, there are ways to mitigate this but it'd be nice if all computing platforms got behind a common standard. Utopia. I know.

yzzxy• 12 years ago

What about just real POSIX and some kind of X interop or compatibility baked in? My (poorly informed) guess is this would allow a lot of low-hanging fruit from Linux, BSD, etc to be ported properly.

alttab• 12 years ago

Inevitably that effort would still fall short, and therefore not really at all. The leverage of linux is the linux community, and the access. Not ls vs dir. IMO. In any case, if they provided the Windows 8 experience built right on top of linux (and all the binaries and everything still worked) it would be a marvel.

cwyers4• 12 years ago

Windows used to have those things. Windows 8 was where they removed it. I believe the official answer nowadays is "run a Unix using Hyper-V."

cperciva• 12 years ago

If Windows 10 was built on top of Linux I'd get a lot more excited.

GPL would make that impossible. There are reasons OS X is based on BSD, and not all of them are about technical superiority.

cwyers4• 12 years ago

Android is built on Linux, and it seems to do just fine despite the kernel being GPL'd.

wfjackson3• 12 years ago

WebOS and Jolla had/have a ton of closed source components(pretty much the whole GUI) but run on top of Linux so there's a loophole somehere.

72deluxe8• 12 years ago

And would all Windows developers leave? Most I bump into see Linux as a toy still, despite the ever-growing army of vocal Python developers who favour development on the platform (if you love slow GUI programs, Python sure is the way to go!)

ANTSANTS5• 12 years ago

The APIs may be annoying (HWND, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, DWORD_PTR dwcsprcadrswtfbbq, NULL, ...) but that backwards compatibility you're suggesting they do away with is pretty much the best thing about Windows. I got so fucking sick of the desktop Linux people constantly breaking everything on foppery and whim that I went back to Windows 7+mingw, and while Stallman would be ashamed of me, I have to say that it's incredibly comforting to use a platform that mostly figured itself out over a decade ago, that won't change under my feet every other month, and even when it does (Windows 8) I can keep using the version I liked best for years and years because they actually took binary compatibility seriously throughout the entire system. There are still people on XP for christ's sake. I'll take that over overzealous redhatters who think they know what's best for me any day.

dragonwriter3• 12 years ago

Being built on Linux as GP suggested doesn't mean its just Linux -- presumably you'd implementing Windows APIs on top of Linux. Think WINE, but without the disadvantage of having to be done by third parties.

Though a more likely way, were Microsoft to want to bridge that gap, would be to have a solid first-party POSIX environment on top of Windows, rather than the other way around.

72deluxe8• 12 years ago

Which bit of Windows do you feel is DOS-like? Did you ever use DOS? The DOS underbelly of Windows disappeared with the release of Windows XP over a decade ago. Windows 95 and 98 were DOS-based, or at least had DOS underpinnings to some extent I think.

From an API point of view, the Win32 API is incredibly stable and reliable and allows the ability to run programs from decades ago. This contrasts sharply with Linux, where the APIs are in a constant state of irritating flux. From a serious development perspective, this might be why the commercial application market has flourished under Windows and why you see commercial Linux applications few and far between, and (usually?) treated as a side attempt before falling by the wayside (as it appears that few Linux users will pass over cash for an application).

I would believe it is a naive approach to ask that Windows be "built on top of Linux". They are architecturally different: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architecture_of_Windows_NT

I do not install mingw or cygwin or any other "Linux-land" compilers/systems on Windows because it feels like I'm using the wrong system - just install Linux if I want all that! It would be better to just use native Visual Studio in Windows-land and keep everything separate, no? Ordinary users that I am writing software for will typically have the Visual-C++ runtimes already installed so bundling of different GNU DLLs is redundant.

robomartin2• 12 years ago

We are now starting a large Python/Django project. All of our software development to date save iOS has been done on Windows machines. It is quickly becoming a PITA to develop these kinds of projects on a non-unix platform. Serioulsly considering switching everyone to Mac Pro's despite cost (10 to 12 seats). Yes, there are work-arounds. Not sure they solve the problem. More than willing to listen to suggestions.

lsiebert• 12 years ago

So does it do dependency management? That to me is essential in a real package management tool.

Eyas• 12 years ago

The release notes here (https://github.com/OneGet/oneget/blob/master/release-notes.m...) show a few mentions of defining and getting dependencies. I'm going to guess the answer is 'yes'.

stingraycharles• 12 years ago

Dependency management is more than 'defining and getting dependencies'. What if package X relies on version 1 of package A, and and package Y relies on version 2 of package A. Will they work together, each in an isolated sandbox, or will you have dependency conflicts?

Package management is a really difficult problem to solve, which linux package managers have barely been able to solve. In addition to this, each programming language usually has its own package manager again, which vary a lot in quality.

beefsack• 12 years ago

That and the ability to control core OS packages so other packages can depend on those correctly where needed.

xyzzy_plugh• 12 years ago

There has been an (albeit poor) package manager for some time: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-ca/library/cc748979(v=ws.10)...

I've personally struggled with it to fix corrupt updated installed by windows updates, and while it doesn't meet the bar set by mainstream Linux distro package managers, it is a package manager nonetheless.

agumonkey• 12 years ago

Amazing how Microsoft keep stuff in obscurity.

w-ll• 12 years ago

Blame marketing.

xpaulbettsx• 12 years ago

Not quite the same - while internally it is basically how you describe, pkgmgr.exe (or more properly CBS/CSI, http://blogs.technet.com/b/askperf/archive/2008/04/23/unders...), is solely for servicing Windows itself. Users can't create packages.

joenathan• 12 years ago

This will be a great way to automate Java and Flash updates, so users don't have play uncheck the adware every time there's an update.

cordite• 12 years ago

Just hope that oracle doesn't try to sneak install the ask toolbar with every update.

aragot• 12 years ago

Is there a reason why we have fewer of those problems with Mac OS X? I can see that the Windows audience often isn't tech-savvy enough to understand that Ask isn't part of Windows, and that's probably also because Chrome/Firefox/Safari are more diligent about managing extensions than IE. But there's a very serious constant problem of spyware/adware in Windows that I don't feel exists in Mac OS X and Linux.

andrewstuart2• 12 years ago

  install-package java --defaults

  > Installing:
  > Java
  > Ask.com toolbar
  > Ask.com rootkit

mahmud• 12 years ago

More like

  C: \>  instpkg32.exe /DefaultSettings:ALL_DEFAULTS
  C: \>

Cryptically named command with verbose arguments, that then goes on to fire a GUI window that requires manual intervention: that's the Microsoft way.

kyllo4• 12 years ago

Cool, but will you still have to restart your computer every time you install something?

olegbl• 12 years ago

Huh, I haven't done that since Vista.

msie• 12 years ago

I have a really hard time believing that.

dunder• 12 years ago

If that's the case, then you haven't installed any big app since then.

3beard• 12 years ago

Running Powershell scripts that continue after reboot is not exactly the greatest feat.

stinos2• 12 years ago

every time seems exaggerated (given that even something major as Visual Studio installs without requiring a restart). Would be like saying Debian always needs a restart after a bunch of updates. Yes it does sometimes, it doesn't on other times.

tip if you want even less restarting on Windows after installing (and less registry rot): always look for portable versions, if you can't find them first just try to get it yourself by extracting from the installer. You'd be surprised for how many installers this wor. Some installers you can just open in 7Zip/UniExtract and the likes and extract, others can be extracted using msiexec /a PathToMSIFile /qb TARGETDIR=DirectoryToExtractTo

yulaow• 12 years ago

Which version do you have of VS that installs without requiring a restart? Because I have vs2013 ultimate and each time I install it in a new machine I have to restart it (maybe two times if I have also to activate hyper-v)

kyllo4• 12 years ago

Yeah, I guess it's not every time anymore, to the extent that developers tend to just package copies of all their app's dependencies with the installer, rather than try to update a shared DLL that may be locked by another program.

sundvor3• 12 years ago

Wow, what's next, ability to shift-ctrl+c & shift-ctrl+v text in the console just by default?

fungi• 12 years ago

2015. The year of the Windows command line :)

useerup8• 12 years ago

Indeed: http://www.techrepublic.com/article/command-prompt-improveme...

sundvor3• 12 years ago

Thanks, that actually looks really good. No-fuss copy and paste, auto resizing windows, transparency, etc. All they needed to do was clone how terminals such as Ubuntu's does it ... and it looks like that's what they did. :) I've been waiting for this for quite some time.

junto• 12 years ago

You mean that right click on the window chrome then select 'mark' then select text then right click window again and then choose 'copy' isn't a good user interface?

dooptroop• 12 years ago

Now tell me the shortcut for scrolling without a mouse. Quickly.

to3m• 12 years ago

No, it's crap, so the only people that do that are beginners, command line tourists, or people using one of the very small number of console programs that support the mouse. Regular console users use the QuickEdit mode: left click to enter select mode, drag box - or double click to select a space-or-line-end-delimited region. Then press return to copy or esc to cancel. Then right click to paste. Squint hard enough, and it's almost like using xterm!

(Bonus feature: you can halt unexpected TTY spew by clicking in the window, giving you a chance to examine it.)

QuickEdit still doesn't fix the box select thing (at least not pre-Windows 10) but it's a massive improvement nonetheless.

snarfy• 12 years ago

Try ConEmu.

https://code.google.com/p/conemu-maximus5/

It's a real windows window, not that stupid /subsystem=console window.

sundvor3• 12 years ago

Thanks, this actually looks really good! I've tried a few of the others but never found any to my liking. Appreciate that, cheers.

amaks2• 12 years ago

But I'm sure that there is nothing like tmux on Windows 10. Perhaps in another 10 years?

zbowling• 12 years ago

The article says that it's the same format as Chocolatey (an existing Windows package management tool) but actually it's a fork of NuGet in Windows 10 and Chocolatey is also a compatible fork of NuGet. Microsoft already owns and maintains NuGet.

viggity• 12 years ago

Not trying to be pedantic, but Microsoft doesn't own/maintain NuGet. OuterCurve does and while MS supports OuterCurve with cash/time, it is its own entity and MS does a good job keeping them separate.

arjie• 12 years ago

Fantastic. It'd be great if it would integrate with the Store. I'm guessing that even if it supports dependency resolution, most packages will just be monolithic blobs like currently. That does have its advantages, so it'll be interesting to see if people switch to specifying dependencies instead of bundling them.

Yuioup2• 12 years ago

Sorry, penguin lovers — if you thought that 2015, in the heinous wake of Windows 8, would finally be the year of desktop Linux, you were sadly mistaken.

If you’ve ever ventured into the dark and mysterious land of Linutopia, where Ubutologists and Debianites reign, ...

Wow what a snarky article! I guess Extremetech does not like Linux at all...

tdicola• 12 years ago

Not too surprising considering their audience are tweakers who want to get the last possible FPS out of their crazy PC gaming rigs.

Ronsenshi• 12 years ago

To be honest, it was kinda funny. I don't see why we can't find it humorous that year after year someone says that the next year will be a year of Linux.

I love Linux - been using it for several years and wouldn't trade it for anything (be it OS X or Win with package manager).

Package manager is certainly an awesome thing, but not something that would make me (and probably anyone else using Linux) to switch over.

girvo• 12 years ago

...someone says that the next year will be a year of Linux.

Who says that unironically in 2014, though?

treerock• 12 years ago

Yesterday I had to update my rarely used Windows partition and install some software for work.

Virus/Firewall updates, Windows updates, Java updates, repeated forced reboots (four times in total) and playing hunt and peck with all these 'suspicious behaviour' popups, remembering to untick the 'install dodgy toolbar' checkboxes.

I'm starting to feel that a decent package manager is the main reason I continue to use Linux.

/rant

Yuioup2• 12 years ago

Ok, but the sad looking Tux suggests otherwise.

On a side note. Linux users should be happy that Windows is using a package manager. It creates more opportunities to get Open Source software into Windows.

"Install-Package GNU", to name as an example.

angry_octet• 12 years ago

I find that snarkiness very reassuring! Some crazy straw man argument, calling us silly names, pretending that open source linux is more mysterious than the mad and secretive Ballmer temple of cash worship... Shows that the die hards are finding their truths to be a web of self deceptions.

progman6• 12 years ago

Nice. Windows which claims to be the default desktop OS copies a basic feature from the Linux "non-desktops" which is a command line package manager :-)

Another irony is that software installation has been much easier and safer on prominent Linux systems like Debian, Suse and Ubuntu than on Windows for the last couple of years.

Final irony is that I (and others) actually use Linux as a desktop system for more than twenty years. Since Windows 8 Linux was even the better desktop :-)

pbhjpbhj5• 12 years ago

Windows which claims to be the default desktop OS copies a basic feature from the Linux "non-desktops" which is a command line package manager :-) //

There's nothing contradictory about that. Good features can come from the worst of software or the best. It's actually a positive change IMO that Microsoft would adopt a good feature in the facing of crowing like "they stole that from linux".

Of course the devil's in the detail; usually when I see something MS are doing and appreciate it they manage to royally confound it - here letting Oracle, and their ilk, install the crapware they currently trick inexperienced users in to having is probably going to be part of that.

chippy4• 12 years ago

The article was not snarky - only that first paragraph was. I imagine it must have made many people stop reading there though.

Mikeb852• 12 years ago

It honestly doesn't even matter anymore... Dell sells Ubuntu machines, Steam OS exists, and between Chrome OS and Android a ton of Linux machines (even if they're not really 'GNU/Linux') are sold every year.

mastazi• 12 years ago

The fact that the Chocolatey repository will be compatible is very convenient, it looks like MS is listening to the user community, well done.

ninjaoxygen• 12 years ago

Hmm, I'm not so sure I appreciate the Chocolately support. I've found the packages really spotty as to where they are going to install, what options they are going to use, whether they bother to provide an uninstaller. I think a large part of that is how Windows manages installation and libraries though. In an ideal world maybe everything would provide MSIs, but they alone are not a silver bullet.

I hope Microsoft take the Updates side seriously - having many separate auto-updaters on the system all taking different views on when they should run is a nightmare. If they created an integrated third-party application update system I would love them for it.

jinushaun• 12 years ago

But those are installer problems, not Chocolatey problems. Anyone who starts on the road to automated installations on Windows realises that it's basically the Wild West. Especially if you need to install XP or Vista era software.

logn• 12 years ago

and who knows, that might just trigger some kind of revolution in Windows app management

Free trials of un-tar? Installing apps that require subscriptions to the cloud? Dev libraries that require enterprise support packages?

Good package management on Linux is owed largely to the tireless voices such as Stallman who understand the core issues here. Yes, tying together install scripts and maintaining repositories requires a lot of work, and good for Microsoft. But the reason It Just Works is because the software is free, from top to bottom, including the OS. And Mac will have the same problem here as Windows. For now, I'm guessing this is just a command-line interface to app stores.

spain• 12 years ago

Pretty much. While it's cool coming from Microsoft I'm willing to bet it's going to be an inferior implementation one way or another compared to Linux distributions.

nailer10• 12 years ago

Why? Powershell innovated a lot over bash - try and kill all processes started in the last hour with bash, then do the same with posh (hint: a regex is a terrible, terrible way to deal with time). MS could do something good with package management.

shin_lao• 12 years ago

Don't be so negative. Microsoft announced a partnership with Docker. And there is a lot of free software on Windows as well.

bradgessler• 12 years ago

You don't get it.

nailer10• 12 years ago

Good package management on Linux is owed largely to the tireless voices such as Stallman

I thought it was due to the people designing the package managers. The people who run the repos Stallman-like end up shipping IceWeasel and Chromium and telling long boring stories to someone who just wanted Firefox and Chrome.

tyho• 12 years ago

It was not the decision of debian to rebrand Firefox. Mozilla forced them to. Debian wanted to be able to ship security patches whenever they pleased, Mozilla required that they shipped Firefox stock, even if that meant waiting for Mozilla to approve security patches.

Chrome is not open source. Chrome tracks you. Chromium is open source and does not track you. Other than the slight branding differences, a user would not know the difference.

How are these slight changes an issue?

Shamanmuni3• 12 years ago

We owe a lot to those who work on package managers and the packages, but he has a point in that if it works so well it has a lot to do with the software being free.

Important things like good and efficient dependency management and library reuse are far easier to achieve when all the relevant sources are available to packagers.

IceWeasel and Chromium visually are Firefox and Chrome with different icons and you'll find them if you search their "real" names in the package manager. Not so hard, right? You can find about why they exist if you are interested, it's not required.

mrknmc• 12 years ago

Package management with Homebrew on OS X actually works quite well. It will be interesting to see what Microsoft comes up with.

awor• 12 years ago

the lead dev and architect for OneGet jumped on the reddit thread yesterday and answered a bunch of questions:

http://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/2khkpo/windows_10_...

using the username : fearthecowboy (his twitter is the same, @fearthecowboy )

This was the top comment: http://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/2khkpo/windows_10_...

berdario2• 12 years ago

Nice... For those who've never heard of him: he's also the main developer behind Coapp

http://coapp.org/

ethomson2• 12 years ago

Do you have a positive experience with CoApp? Mine has been overwhelmingly negative: it does not appear to work, does not appear to be maintained and does not appear to be supported.

I've been trying to get somebody to provide even a little bit of support for Native Nuget packages via CoApp for months: http://stackoverflow.com/q/24331880/729881

emsy• 12 years ago

I believe the biggest problem for its success is that most companies don't want to give up the control a dedicated installer gives them (e.g. installing AskBar that comes with Java, as some comments pointed out).

In Linux, dedicated installers are the exception not the rule. I'm curious how the adoption on Windows will be, especially for commercial/non-free software which there is a lot on Windows.

I'm also curious how they will present the packages to the average user. Worst case, the user will have to look in three different places to uninstall software (namely System Control, the package manager, and in directories of software that isn't registered anywhere).

bnt• 12 years ago

But why "Install-Package", "Add-Package" and "Update-Package" - it's not like you can install, add or update anything else with this tool.

firepacket2• 12 years ago

They are using the same syntax as NuGet- the Visual Studio package manager console.

alkonaut2• 12 years ago

Descriptive names are good (to some limit). You can maybe add something else (a remote repo? Something else), or maybe it isn't unthinkable that Add-X will eventually be a feature. You can always make an alias "inst" so it's better to keep the underlying command long and descriptive.

Also: these should be edited with autocomplete.

useerup8• 12 years ago

Those are PowerShell cmdlets - and follow PowerShell verb-noun naming convention. There is a finite set of "approved" verbs (though you can use your own) representing the "actions" you can perform against a resource (the noun part).

From within a PowerShell console I can "add" a lot of things. Try typing

    gcm -verb add

from a PowerShell console (gcm is alias for Get-Command and the command above will list all commands where "Add" is the verb).

josteink• 12 years ago

I take it you don't have much experience with powershell, which is fair enough. Most people don't.

Long story short: These are "Commandlets", commands provided to your PowerShell-session through extension-modules.

The PowerShell convention for command-names are Verb-Noun, like for instance Get-DiskImage or whatever, so it makes sense that OneGet builds on these.

Animats• 12 years ago

There will probably be a GUI for it, called an "App store".

Windows Vista had a command-line package manager, although it was rather lame. It was a kludge to feed canned answers to installer prompts.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc748979%28v=ws.1...

ferrari8608• 12 years ago

Windows has an app store already. I don't know if it works with the command-line tool, but if not, I'm sure they will be tied together eventually. Ubuntu has an app store as well.

johnchristopher2• 12 years ago

While Windows and Mac users have to run graphical installers — you know, where you hit Next a few times and try to avoid installing bundled crapware — Linux users can just open up a command line and type sudo apt-get install vlc.

Right. As if VLC on windows comes with crapware.

As if apt-get [0] never asked cryptic messages [1].

[0] or yaourt or any other package manager

[1] and it's more about the package than the package manager

dnet• 12 years ago

As if VLC on windows comes with crapware.

At least it did, in a way

http://www.howtogeek.com/194993/the-windows-store-is-a-cessp...

johnchristopher2• 12 years ago

The Store Even Pollutes System Search
rse yet, the Windows Store is now integrated with the system search feature. Search for an application using the Start screen search or search charm and these garbage apps from the Windows Store will appear. For example, whenever I use the system search feature to launch Firefox, I see a link to install “Firefox Training Lite” from the Windows Store.

This is insane.

But it's hardly VLC's fault. You could say Windows is distributing malwares.

kevingadd• 12 years ago

Technically, MSI has supported GUI-less command line installation from the beginning, with relatively good dependency management and error reporting. I've invoked MSIexec from install/provisioning scripts fairly often as part of continuous integration toolchains and it works great. Some of my applications also know how to pull down dependencies (like the windows SDK, or the MS CLR) off microsoft's servers via HTTPS and then invoke the installer automatically so features that depend on them can Just Work.

If the package manager knows how to leverage this (no doubt it will), that will allow GUI-less installation of a huge percentage of windows apps (MSI is relatively popular now despite its quirks.)

gerbal2• 12 years ago

There are a surprising number of malicious repackages of common FOSS utilities like VLC and 7zip i've seen non-expert Windows users install. It's actually not all that uncommon.

pmontra• 12 years ago

Welcome Windows10! What next, maybe a network oriented display manager to be able to open a window on another pc, phone, tablet, xbox? ;-)

tn132• 12 years ago

I am not sure why even in 2014 we have to pit Linux against Windows. We have surely grown out of that sort of debate.

Microsoft successfully achieved its objective of putting a computer in every home with the help of Windows. We should thank them for that. Linux on other hand has grown leaps and bounds. Android after all is a linux kernel fork. I think as technology lovers we can surely love both and look at them as technologies complimenting each other rather than competing.

inclemnet• 12 years ago

I am not sure why even in 2014 we have to pit Linux against Windows. We have surely grown out of that sort of debate.

I think it's unfair to frame any linux/windows debate as fundamentally childish. There are big differences between them, both philosophical and practical, in ways that have real impacts on the users.

tn132• 12 years ago

I never said there are no differences but those differences are more like between a Business Suite and Bikini rather than Republican Party v/s Democratic Party.

Two different OSs which have a different view of the world and catering to different needs in different ways rather than something where their success is a zero sum game between them.

SamReidHughes• 12 years ago

If you want to decide what OS to use, you need criteria by which to make that decision.

Havvy• 12 years ago

Sure, but there's no reason for a Windows enhancement to be framed as a Linux vs. Windows thing, except as antagonistic clickbait. As somebody who uses both Windows and Linux, I'm not sad that Windows is becoming more usable. I'm happy - it's one less thing to complain about using Windows.

alkonaut2• 12 years ago

Having a package manager is one thing, having a good curated repo of packages is another. I doubt MS Will have the balls to say that all their "partners" (most of the AV vendors, Oracle, ...) whose entire business model is based on crapware or bait & switch will somehow be banned from the repo?

Currently it seems that both the apt and choclatey versions of Java actually come without crapware. I have a feeling that if this kind of install becomes the default then the crapware will be bundled there too.

nailer10• 12 years ago

I'm not really sure that relationship with AV vendors is as strong these days for MS to harm Windows UX.

pjc504• 12 years ago

Microsoft Security Essentials is actively trying to put them out of business. I had the impression that it was the OEMs who liked bundling terrible software.

I was looking at tablet PCs and they have some marketing term for "verified by Microsoft not to contain preinstalled crapware". Android doesn't have that.

vertex-four• 12 years ago

OneGet comes with Chocolatey as a repository pre-installed for now - not sure if it will when Windows 10 releases, but I'm sure the repository won't be hard to install.

coldtea2• 12 years ago

Having a package manager is one thing, having a good curated repo of packages is another.

So? Most open source distros have nothing but that -- all kinds of crap.

pbhjpbhj5• 12 years ago

Distros have curated repos.

Launchpad and such are not curated.

lucb1e3• 12 years ago

Good step, now the rest of Windows... I mean, Program Files containing the binaries is not even in %PATH%. I assume improvements will be made here too, but I wonder.

pjc504• 12 years ago

One problem with putting every subdirectory of Program Files in the path is that most of them contain 'setup.exe' and 'uninstall.exe'. Type "uninstall" at the command line to uninstall a random program!

lucb1e3• 12 years ago

Or we could use a real binaries path (e.g. %programfiles%/bin) and symlink (NTFS supports symlinks I think) the binaries from there. Then include that in the %path%.

There are many ways to do this but until Windows and its developers decide on one, it'll remain a big mess.

dpina• 12 years ago

Plus, it seems like puppet is working on a plugin to make use of OneGet. It'll make work much more interesting in the future that I'm actually looking forwarding this happening.

Couldn't find much more on puppet on this topic than this presentation: http://www.slideshare.net/ferventcoder

lucian1900• 12 years ago

much to the lament of Linux users

What? Everyone will be happy to have one, especially people that use Linux at least some of the time.

krylon5• 12 years ago

I agree. I use OSX and Linux at home, but I am a Windows admin at work. And while I strongly prefer Unix-like systems to Windows, I welcome every effort to improve it and make my job easier.

jimmcslim• 12 years ago

Chocolatey is great... although I wish it had a different "more professional"-sounding name.

When I was using it in anger a while ago I also found the quality of some of the packages to be a bit random, many of them just seemed to be random developer X's favourite aggregation of other packages. In which case I'm happy to see that they are adopting package moderation;

http://geekswithblogs.net/robz/archive/2014/10/27/chocolatey...

ForFreedom• 12 years ago

Any idea when its available for download for consumers?

gerbal2• 12 years ago

Today. http://oneget.org/oneget.zip

chippy4• 12 years ago

But will it have sudo, or would you run PowerShell as Administrator?

UnoriginalGuy3• 12 years ago

Windows has runas and has since Windows NT 4.0. Maybe you should educate yourself instead of making incorrect snarky comments?

talles2• 12 years ago

Jeez, take it easy.

It's a legit question, few people are aware of runas.

chippy4• 12 years ago

wow.

annnnd• 12 years ago

I think the article misses the point. It doesn't matter if the package manager is CLI or GUI-based, what matters is good UI and quality (+ price) of application packages.

Mobile stores (Google Play, Apple Store) are a good example of this... they host many apps & are easy to use. Who cares if you use keyboard, mouse or touch to get them.

rejschaap• 12 years ago

I think there is a huge missed opportunity here. I mean, it's good that Microsoft is finally adding functionality that went mainstream in the late 90's. But why don't just skip the flawed approach most of the current Linux distributions use? In my opinion they should have been looking at a more declaritive approach, such as the Nix package manager uses.

I will agree though that this oversight is not as bad as TFSVC. Where they were building a centralized version control system when the whole world was switching to decentralized VCSs.

windowsworkstoo• 12 years ago

It's not the NixOS approach and it needs some work to make it more palatable, but they already ship DSC with PoSH/WMF 4, which goes some of the way.

analog31• 12 years ago

I love it. Bring on "sudo apt-get install."

Somehow, folks have been led to think that the command line is a scary place, just for geeks, but it's so easy to lead someone through a slightly complex manual installation by just giving them a few commands to copy and paste into the terminal.

And as a somewhat casual user myself, I even find it easier to follow a command line installation than to wade through several pages of "open this window, click on this, click on that," especially when the instructions and the actual installer don't exactly agree due to revision divergence.

talles2• 12 years ago

Presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAMEVMO4IRY

jeffmess• 12 years ago

Welcome to the party!

meapix• 12 years ago

linux is not package manager

GuiA• 12 years ago

Find-Package
Install-Package

Dashes and uppercase...what terrible names. Is the windows shell case sensitive (I seem to recall it is but it may have changed)? We've been designing command line interfaces for over half a century now, this is just lazy. Shells are not magically exempt from UI best practices just because they're not graphical.

geographomics• 12 years ago

It's not case sensitive in terms of execution, this is just how they are stylized: "Verb-Noun" is the standard format for PowerShell commands (or "cmdlets", to use their terminology).

be5invis• 12 years ago

Have you ever used Powershell? All Powershell cmdlets are named in that way, and you also can create aliases.

jmcqk6• 12 years ago

You can also easily setup aliases, and there are many unixy aliases built in. For example 'ls', 'cat', other will work. I don't even know the commandlets they're aliasing.

snake_plissken• 12 years ago

In terms of managing programs/packages, what is wrong with Add-Remove Programs/Programs and Features? I've always found these to be satisfactory. Or am missing the point here? In terms of automatically retrieving the correct dependencies, I can see this being pretty useful, even if most programs already automatically install the dependencies or at least let you know that you don't have them. Maybe I'll find myself in .Net framework or MS C++ distribution hell a little bit less. The same problem, with missing or incorrect shared libraries, seems to happen just as much when I am on a Free/Net/OpenBSD system. And the workflow for installing a Windows program is fundamentally different from the *Nix eco-system; as the former is mostly closed while the latter open, you have to be much more discrete when installing on Windows.

Maybe I am using Windows differently than a lot of other people even if I consider myself a "power" user. I've always felt much of Windows' power and usability came from it's GUI focused experience (forgetting the maddening changes that can occur between versions).

Post: after writing all that, I looked at Programs and Features (on windows 7 now) and I think the biggest advantage of something like this would be mapping out dependencies, even if I don't think I've ever deleted one by mistake. Still, it would be nice.

432uihf23• 12 years ago

Installing and updating Windows programs is painfully slow and complicated compared to Linux. Instead of searching for a program and clicking "Install", you have to find and navigate to the website, download the installer, execute it, grant permissions to run, uncheck adware boxes, choose install options and click exit. For every single program. Many programs still make you do the same for every update and that's one of the reasons most users don't keep their software up-to-date.

Installing and managing software is easily my biggest gripe with Windows right now.

davidgerard• 12 years ago

So is this basically taking Ninite's business model?

aespinoza• 12 years ago

I hope they change the options. I think this is way too long for a command:

* Install-Package -Name firefox

When in Linux I can just do this:

* apt-get install firefox

I would love to see this:

Package -install firefox

happy_ginger• 12 years ago

That is pretty much an impossibility as it's a Powershell cmdlet which follows a verb-noun rule for naming things.

Karunamon2• 12 years ago

This requirement has kept me away from taking powershell seriously. English is a horrible language for telling computers what to do.

benjin3• 12 years ago

I've always thought verb-noun made more sense (since functionality in powershell isn't bundled/accessed as a complete program it has that flexibility).

* Install-Package firefox

would be hugely preferable, though. Smart defaults are good things!

Fuzzwah• 12 years ago

I'm coming to this massive comment party late, but I wanted to drop my thoughts about this and explain why I'm personally very excited by OneGet.

I'm a very experienced Windows Server Admin (15 years). I'm also a fairly experienced Linux Server Admin (7 years, on and off).

I'm currently an SCCM guru for a ~4000 user organisation.

I'm sure that if OneGet is supported by MS to the level which the developer explained in the reddit thread it'll be a boon to power users managing their own systems and to desktop support people.

But I can imagine that it'll be the SCCM teams who can leverage the most out of it.

The thought of being able to deploy and manage software across desktops and servers in a similar way to apt or yum makes me feel something close to utter joy.

I've had to build some very complex task sequences to install software on corporate machines. The worst example I can give is MS's own Dynamics CRM application. I was seriously proud of the batch files, registry inserts, dll hell avoidance, dependency solving, mother of all automated install processes to get Dynamics installed and hooked into Outlook in a magical way that the end user had no clue the complexity of.

It was only after slugging through developing all of the above that I found the incredible PowerShell App Deployment Toolkit [1], which people smarter than me had developed to basically handle everything I'd just slogged through.

From what I see OneGet has the potential of allowing us to easily push installs and updates via SCCM with out having to rely on 3rd party tools, batch files, msi rebuilding and general hackery.

Even if it doesn't gain wide support from software vendors, just enabling me to rip everything out of an msi and repackage it into a private OneGet repo sounds superior to having to rely on complex SCCM task sequences.

I'll be watching this closely.

[1] https://psappdeploytoolkit.codeplex.com/

whoisthemachine• 12 years ago

It seems to me if Microsoft is copying features from Linux for Windows, then it may be that Linux on the desktop is starting to worry them.

krylon5• 12 years ago

As much as I wish it were so, I do not think that is the case at all. What worries them, if anything, is more people using Macs, and more people ditching their PC/laptop in favor of shiny smartphones and tablets.

slavik812• 12 years ago

I liked how the idea's champion dealt with Microsoft bureaucracy:

So, back in August I started looking at what I was going to accomplish over the next year or so, and I thought it would be a good idea to try and see if I could get some of the CoApp package management ideas put into Windows itself (hey, it'd be kinda nice to be able to do apt-get style-stuff and have that built into the OS)
I had proposed some of this at the beginning of the product cycle for Windows Blue (Server 2012 R2/Windows 8.1) but it was a little too late in the planning cycle, and I gave too-grand of a vision.
I finally came to full understanding of some advice my pappy once told me: "The secret to success is to find someone else to care what you care about, and make it their problem." ... I looked at him like I understood what he meant, but he could tell that I was just paying lip service. He then said "Try it this way: Set the building on fire, take someone else's stuff into the building with you, and then cry for help"

http://coapp.org/news/2013-10-02-State-of-CoApp.html

Windows 10 will come with a command-line package manager

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