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Free Software Building and Packaging for Windows (win-builds.org)
49 points by T-A on Sept 5, 2015 | hide | past | favorite | 13 comments



If you are interested in this, also check out https://ninite.com .

Nowadays with adware-including installers and phony download links, any solution to the packaging problem in Windows is welcome.


There is also Npackd[1][2] with the ability to locally host your own repository[3].

[1] https://github.com/tim-lebedkov/npackd

[2] https://npackd.appspot.com/

[3] https://github.com/tim-lebedkov/npackd/wiki/RepositoryHostin...


Am I wrong in thinking that basically, the best package manager available for Windows is Steam?


Steam is proprietary, closed-source, has a single for-profit vendor, uses closed communication protocols (e.g. for Friends) preventing an open reimplementation, and there's no automated way of submitting new packages. Not to mention the scandals where it read through your browser history.

The download UI is nice, it does use plain http/s for package delivery, and it has a large install base. But i definitely do not think it is the best package manager available on Windows.


Faults aside, I think Steam's model is worth considering in terms of what features a package manager might need to succeed on Windows. Everything else posted here seems like it wants to replicate the Linux experience in Windows, and I suspect that would have limited appeal.



Chocolatey is pretty good


OneGet is supposedly also an option, last I heard it is essentially acting as a wrapper for Chocolatey and shipped in the W10 RTM.

Since it is supported by MS that one might win out over all of the others eventually.

See also the comments made here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topihttps://groups.google....

I'm still on W8 machine here so I have not had the chance to test whether it is buggy or not...


chocolatey seems fine if you are a package consumer, and never want to create/maintain your own packages.

if you are in a business/organisation that also wants to use the same thing to manage your own in-house package dependencies -- it doesn't seem like such an appropriate solution.


Take a look at spoon.net, you can script creating / deploying images and it works pretty well.


Also https://chocolatey.org/ for software. Though they might not always have the latest versions.


Saying 'runs on Cygwin' is a little obtuse when these packages are built with mingw-w64 to run on win32. The packages won't understand cygwin paths nor cygwin symlinks, and good luck linking to these libraries from a cygwin program.

EDIT: Oh, i think the copy intended to mean 'can be cross-compiled from a cygwin environment'. Leaving comment for posterity.


So if say boost is updated - is it going to break by VS solution and I'm going to have to go manually update the version numbers in all my projects?




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