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The Day AppGet Died (2020)

keivan.io

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Re: The Day AppGet Died (2020)

#91

Post by chem83 »

derkoe wrote: post #43

Please don't use any of these. Use scoop - it just works https://github.com/ScoopInstaller/scoop No admin needed for almost all packages, "scoop update *" to update your system, authoring packages is very easy.

I like an I use scoop alongside winget after many years of Chocolatey, but there are many packages not available through scoop, mostly because there isn't a viable portable way to install them. Also, scoop does nothing to take advantage of the MSIX Containers that sandbox apps, so that they can be cleanly update and later removed.

I'm considering automating the conversion of my most used apps to MSIX, so they can get always installed in a clean way. That may break certain apps like Steam, which need to install outside the virtual FS, but I hear MSIX supports global registry an global FS access exceptions nowadays, so not all hope is lost.

Re: The Day AppGet Died (2020)

#92

Post by chem83 »

andix wrote: post #84

I don’t get why he was so upset about it. Microsoft didn’t want to accept his offer. But still WinGet is not as good as AppGet. So if he just had kept going his way with AppGet, maybe WinGet would have never gotten any traction. Like a lot of projects, Microsoft more or less abandoned WinGet right away. You still can’t do „winget update“ and update all your installed packages. For me one of the main features of a pac…

Won't 'winget upgrade --all' do the trick for you?

Re: The Day AppGet Died (2020)

#93

Post by chem83 »

morelish wrote: post #27

Good read. I’ve used chocolatey a lot plus a lot of other Microsoft installation tools. Windows has been crying out for a decent package manager for years. It’s amazing how little of a sh*t Microsoft seemed to give about stuff that open-source systems provide as a first class citizen. As they care next-to-zero about decent tooling, it’s no surprise they care even less about independent developers like Keivan. I’m pre…

There's very little incentive to adopt Linux as a kernel given how popular Microsoft is with consumer grade OEMs developing for the WHQL driver program. That's one point of competitive advantage Microsoft would be nuts to let go off.

Also, sysinternals and psh alone are very compelling examples of sophisticated tooling for the Windows ecosystem. So much so that they were ported to other platforms for the Windows users wanting to explore Mac and Linux.

And while Microsoft failed so far to create a decent package management solution for Windows, the problem really isn't how to manage packages, but rather how Win32 software assumes certain levels of access to system internals. This problem was mostly solved with the introduction of MSIX, so Microsoft needs to find a better carrot to incentivize developers to deploy with MSIX so winget can work properly.

Re: The Day AppGet Died (2020)

#94

Post by easton »

arepublicadoceu wrote: post #75
electroly wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Keivan should probably be a (multi) millionaire now, sitting comfortably with his family doing whatever it is they enjoy doing. Instead, someone at Microsoft used this as a way to get themselves a promotion. To be fair, AppGet was never really that popular, and Microsoft's replacement is even less so. I'd be surprised if anyone got a promotion based on their WinGet work. There has been no significant adoption of Wi…

> I'd be surprised if anyone got a promotion based on their WinGet work. There has been no significant adoption of WinGet in the market. Because it's an terrible implementation of a package management. Don't get me wrong, it's better than nothing but still... For instance: - we can't pin packages (there's an open issue for God knows how long) Problem with that is that if you do "winget upgrade --all" it will upgrade…

> Some programs have a problem with their version (GOG Galaxy for instance). Winget simply doesn’t know that there’s no newer version available and keep trying to upgrade everytime you do “winget upgrade –all”. This, in turn, make the previous point more annoying as I can’t say to winget ignore “GOG Galaxy” and upgrade all the other packages.

This was resolved in the latest preview release (well, the PR merged a couple months ago, but they seem to release once every million years). If you want to upgrade to preview temporarily it will still automatically update to stable releases.

https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli/releases/tag/v1.3.43...

https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli/pull/1765

Re: The Day AppGet Died (2020)

#95

Post by [deleted] »

andix wrote: post #84

I don’t get why he was so upset about it. Microsoft didn’t want to accept his offer. But still WinGet is not as good as AppGet. So if he just had kept going his way with AppGet, maybe WinGet would have never gotten any traction. Like a lot of projects, Microsoft more or less abandoned WinGet right away. You still can’t do „winget update“ and update all your installed packages. For me one of the main features of a pac…

[deleted]

Re: The Day AppGet Died (2020)

#96

Post by john_moscow »

WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #28

I dunno, getting inspired and copying all the ideas, deciding that they can do a good enough job internally instead of hiring Keivan doesn’t sound like a bad thing in and of itself. It’s the stringing along that makes my blood boil. After reading things like this, I’m thinking, what I’d do differently? Maybe have them reimburse all my travel upfront. No money, no meetings. Also, bill all the meetings and conversation…

>I dunno, getting inspired and copying all the ideas, deciding that they can do a good enough job internally instead of hiring Keivan doesn’t sound like a bad thing in and of itself.

It just completely kills the motivation to make any kind of system tools like this. If your tool fails, you have wasted your time. If it succeeds, the OS vendor will kill it overnight with a free knock-off, so you have also wasted your time.

OS/platform vendors should know it better if they want to maintain a thriving ecosystem of contributors, but nobody seems to care anymore. Shops knocking off most successful products with store brands, Apple doing the same with some popular apps, Amazon Basics, this. And then we wonder why so many people are depressed and don't see a future for themselves anymore.

Re: The Day AppGet Died (2020)

#97

Post by svnpenn »

kh_hk wrote: post #6

I say the following not knowing anything about appget internals. I hope I could find proper words to express the sour feelings when there's not enough credit given. It's always easy to dismiss something as: "gee, thats the obvious way to do it, there's nothing unique about it". Novel ideas always turn out to be obvious once they are implemented. The foundations of knowledge are based on the same principle. Standing o…

Exactly. Some "simple solution" might just be the end result of months or years of different iterations. Sometimes you can't know the best method until you've slowly and methodically tried all the worse ones.

Re: The Day AppGet Died (2020)

#98

Post by LeonB »

This caused a big splash at the time.

Here’s some links on ‘what happened next’ (though I’d love to know what else has happened since!)

- “Microsoft finally gives AppGet developer the credit he deserves” (https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2020/6/2/21277863/micr...)

Microsoft response:

- “winget install learning” by “Andrew” at Microsoft (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/winget-install-le...)

Re: The Day AppGet Died (2020)

#99

Post by intern4tional »

CRConrad wrote: post #88
electroly wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Keivan should probably be a (multi) millionaire now, sitting comfortably with his family doing whatever it is they enjoy doing. Instead, someone at Microsoft used this as a way to get themselves a promotion. To be fair, AppGet was never really that popular, and Microsoft's replacement is even less so. I'd be surprised if anyone got a promotion based on their WinGet work. There has been no significant adoption of Wi…

> it's fairly clear to me that the author failed the interview. What's important here is how he "failed the interview": He was probably never going to pass it. They'd already "failed" him beforehand for being an Open Source freak; the whole charade was just to string him along.

Microsoft employs many people that are open-source advocates. Someone's perspective on that would not impact their status in an interview.

If anything, the reason feedback took forever to him was because someone may have asked for an exception to the interview failure so they could hire him. Large companies are behemoths and things do go wrong, mistakes are made, and Microsoft did own up to it in this case (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/winget-install-le...) but open source did not play a part in it.

Source: myself, I worked at Microsoft in a past life and did many interviews. No one cares about someone's stance on open source anymore.

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