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Introducing PackageManagement in Windows 10

blogs.technet.com

81–90 of 221 posts

Re: Introducing PackageManagement in Windows 10

#81

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....

One of the core issues with breaking this pattern is that you're installing a new feature on this reboot, then installing all of its patches on the next reboot. So you install 186 updates on a fresh install. This includes .NET 4.5 (or 4.5.1 or 4.5.2), and requires a reboot. Now you're done right? You just installed 168 updates, how many updates can there be? On your next reboot, you get another 60 updates, of which 2…

Yep, this is exactly what I'm talking about.

I don't see why they cant 'look ahead' to say; Oh- this update X depends on update Y, but it's going to be installed, so we could just add it in the queue anyway.

Re: Introducing PackageManagement in Windows 10

#82
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why Putty over mintty? mintty is a fork of PuTTY's UI for local use, and is the default in cygwin these days.

I can't believe in 2015 PuTTY is still a thing. Other platforms have a half dozen terminal programs, three of which are usually very good, and Windows has one that looks like it was hacked together on a weekend in 1998.

It's an ssh client. It is robust, easy to install and it works well.

How much energy do you expect me to waste evaluating and choosing new ones when the one I have works just fine the way it is? I have better things to be doing.

Re: Introducing PackageManagement in Windows 10

#83
post #73

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....

The way around this is to update your deployment images from time to time. It's one reason I liked service packs, new service pack comes out, generate a new install image.

Right, and that takes care of the 'big ones', but you still have tons of other minor updates that are released every Patch Tuesday.

I currently have Jenkins build an OS image every two weeks, just so our Deployment Server has an up to date image.

Re: Introducing PackageManagement in Windows 10

#84
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why Putty over mintty? mintty is a fork of PuTTY's UI for local use, and is the default in cygwin these days.

I can't believe in 2015 PuTTY is still a thing. Other platforms have a half dozen terminal programs, three of which are usually very good, and Windows has one that looks like it was hacked together on a weekend in 1998.

There is no analogy to putty on a Unix platform, because its not just implementing the console interface, its also the SSH implementation as well, on Unix systems, its pretty easy to write a fully functioning terminal, because your just hooking into the existing pty system, so all you need to do is write (or borrow) a competent vt100 emulation, and make a UI.

PuTTY is great, honestly. It's not pretty, but neither is the windows console nor PowerShell.

Re: Introducing PackageManagement in Windows 10

#85
post #65
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't even mind the multiple restarts, the part that bothers me is that I have to babysit Windows Update as soon as my machine finishes restarting, tell it to get updates, tell it to install now, and then have it restart again. If Windows Update could collect all the update packages, and I could leave it alone for 20 minutes and come back to a fully updated system, that would be fantastic.

Yeah, this seems like it should be pretty straightforward (I'm sure it is harder than it seems, but still). Set a flag that persists through multiple reboots that says "after Windows loads, if there are updates, apply them and reboot, repeat, otherwise unset the flag".

Fun fact: I helped tweak up a Powershell script that does this exact thing: https://github.com/tomswartz07/packer-windows/blob/master/sc...

Re: Introducing PackageManagement in Windows 10

#86

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....

An addendum to this is that Windows needs to restart way too often compared to Linux. When I apply my daily yum updates for CentOS, only kernel updates, which are very infrequent, require a reboot.

Every time I do Windows Updates, I need to reboot. This is highly annoying and IMO makes Windows Server YYYY completely unsuitable for servers.

Re: Introducing PackageManagement in Windows 10

#87

Please give us something that doesn't require PowerShell, since PowerShell never just works. Just look at the ridiculous bullshit that you have to deal with when you want to use Chocolatey (from the Chocolatey install guide): Note: You must have your execution policy set to unrestricted (or at least in bypass) for this to work (Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted). There have been reports that RemoteSigned is enough for…

It's like they wanted sudo and user accounts with arbitrary permissions but had no idea how to do that, so they did UAC and this stuff instead.

Windows has an analogy to sudo, called runas

UAC is designed to solve a different problem, users on Windows historically ran as administrator, and much legacy software requires it, UAC is designed to provide an apparent administrator environment to the software but catch what the software is using, and give the user a chance to approve privilege escalation.

Re: Introducing PackageManagement in Windows 10

#88
post #56
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use cygwin. I run cygwinsshd on localhost:22 and use Putty for my client. A lot of windows-specific gui commands won't work through the ssh layer, but will if you run the cygwin bash shell directly. (Maybe there's some way to get them to work over SSH but I have never had reason to try and figure it out). $ which nmap.exe /cygdrive/c/Program Files/Nmap/nmap.exe $ nmap.exe -PN -p 80,443 news.ycombinator.com | grep t…

Why Putty over mintty? mintty is a fork of PuTTY's UI for local use, and is the default in cygwin these days.

Copy/pasting long lines of text from the terminal...so tired of fixing all the broken lines manually.

Re: Introducing PackageManagement in Windows 10

#89

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…

I am a Java dev and don't use VS and things basically work "out of the box" for me. I used to be a big "Linux is the best dev env" kinda person but I've changed my mind since I started doing Window's development - it really is just as easy - for the stuff I do.
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