Introducing PackageManagement in Windows 10 • Hacker News Board

Re: Introducing PackageManagement in Windows 10

#41

Post by lmedinas » Wed, Apr 29, 2015, 4:52 PM UTC

Windows badly needs this to be a general Development OS. Lot's of developers in the last years run away from Windows to OSX and Linux because of this.

Without Visual Studio, which installs the C++ and .Net dev env, it's a pain to install anything which works out of the box in Windows.

Example: Perl or Python both have an installer but you have to update the system PATH, the console sucks so you can never use it, no simple way to keep it update unless you use the installer again and so on...

If all these goodies are available in a "unixy away" i'm sure Windows will be used by general Developers.

Re: Introducing PackageManagement in Windows 10

#42

Post by wldcordeiro » Wed, Apr 29, 2015, 4:53 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #38

igravious wrote: post #6

I recently blogged about the Linux world needing something like this. http://leto.electropoiesis.org/propaganda/plugins-and-packag... I hate having to individually update my Wordpress install, my Rubies, my system packages, my IDE (be it Eclipse or Android Studio), a separate TeXLive install from the OS packages, even Vim now has its own package management with Pathogen... There must be some way to _unify_ this proli…

It's a disaster. The proper way to do it is distro packages, but for some reason every language, framework, ecosystem and individual developer wants to reinvent this particular wheel. I really don't understand why.

Distro packages move slower than people would like so they create their own solution.

Re: Introducing PackageManagement in Windows 10

#43

Post by lzybkr » Wed, Apr 29, 2015, 4:59 PM UTC

maratc wrote: post #35

maccard wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean like PowerShell?

No, the one with history going back more than an hour, and tab completions on anything except files in `pwd`.

Try https://github.com/lzybkr/PSReadLine - included in Windows 10 now.

Re: Introducing PackageManagement in Windows 10

#44

Post by k-mcgrady » Wed, Apr 29, 2015, 5:04 PM UTC

lmedinas wrote: post #41

Windows badly needs this to be a general Development OS. Lot's of developers in the last years run away from Windows to OSX and Linux because of this. Without Visual Studio, which installs the C++ and .Net dev env, it's a pain to install anything which works out of the box in Windows. Example: Perl or Python both have an installer but you have to update the system PATH, the console sucks so you can never use it, no s…

>> "Without Visual Studio, which installs the C++ and .Net dev env, it's a pain to install anything which works out of the box in Windows."

On Mac don't you need to installed the Xcode command line tools before being able to do most dev stuff?

Re: Introducing PackageManagement in Windows 10

#45

Post by cwyers » Wed, Apr 29, 2015, 5:04 PM UTC

davexunit wrote: post #21

cwyers wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unify != replace. Guix/Nix don't integrate multiple package managers, it just is Another Package Manager.

They are the only package managers I know of capable of unifying package management with a single set of tools. Unifying multiple distinct package managers is a fool's errand.

I don't see how they can. Guix/Nix don't run on Windows, so they can't replace the NPM or PIP or Ruby Gems, first off. But I don't even see anything about Guix/Nix that make them especially capable of unifying Linux package management. (Heck, given that there's two of them, I don't see how either can be said to unify the specific kind of Linux package management they do.)

Re: Introducing PackageManagement in Windows 10

#46

Post by eliaspro » Wed, Apr 29, 2015, 5:04 PM UTC

Although I applaud the efforts, at the current state that's just sugarcoating the nastiness of code-executing installers. A package installation should basically just deploy the components of a passive package archive to the filesystem and leave any actions to the package manager. This solution doesn't even provide a generic interface e.g. to run a query which file would be provided by which package or to which package a specific file in the filesystem belongs to. The installation process still relies on mostly uncontrollable code execution.

Re: Introducing PackageManagement in Windows 10

#47

Post by swasheck » Wed, Apr 29, 2015, 5:07 PM UTC

theg2 wrote: post #36

WorldWideWayne wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, one command - on every machine... Meanwhile on Linux, I don't need to do any special configuration to run scripts.

You do if those scripts can affect the system and need to run as root. Powershell is incredibly powerful (and dangerous) and some security isn't the worst thing.

the irony of this is that if ms were to leave powershell open to run any scripts from anywhere at any time, they'd be ridiculed for lax security policies.

Re: Introducing PackageManagement in Windows 10

#48

Post by igravious » Wed, Apr 29, 2015, 5:09 PM UTC

vezzy-fnord wrote: post #17

igravious wrote: post #6

I recently blogged about the Linux world needing something like this. http://leto.electropoiesis.org/propaganda/plugins-and-packag... I hate having to individually update my Wordpress install, my Rubies, my system packages, my IDE (be it Eclipse or Android Studio), a separate TeXLive install from the OS packages, even Vim now has its own package management with Pathogen... There must be some way to _unify_ this proli…

There must be some way to _unify_ this proliferation of software update mechanisms. There's PackageKit, though that's mostly used for creating those graphical software center/app store types of applications.

Interesting approach. Link here:

http://www.freedesktop.org/software/PackageKit/pk-intro.html

Re: Introducing PackageManagement in Windows 10

#49

Post by igravious » Wed, Apr 29, 2015, 5:10 PM UTC

davexunit wrote: post #21

cwyers wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unify != replace. Guix/Nix don't integrate multiple package managers, it just is Another Package Manager.

They are the only package managers I know of capable of unifying package management with a single set of tools. Unifying multiple distinct package managers is a fool's errand.

> Unifying multiple distinct package managers is a fool's errand.

I'm really hoping that isn't the case.

Re: Introducing PackageManagement in Windows 10

#50

Post by drzaiusapelord » Wed, Apr 29, 2015, 5:11 PM UTC

tomswartz07 wrote: post #26

Perhaps I missed it, but the article doesn't mention this in any way: Windows ABSOLUTELY needs a way to go from 'Fresh Install' to 'Fully upgraded' with minimal interaction. Linux can do this: run `apt-get dist-upgrade` in Ubuntu, and you get all of the most recent updates. However, in Windows, you install 3 updates, restart, install 5 updates, restart, install 110 updates, restart....

>restart

This isn't going to happen. MS is tied deeply into restarting due to how it loads libraries and other issues. Unless they write a new OS from scratch and give up on legacy compatibility, well, don't hold your breath.