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>> Ninite is great for a small selection of apps, but it is not a package manager by any means. I guess this is the root of my question, how does Chocolatey "m

>> Ninite is great for a small selection of apps, but it is not a package manager by any means. I guess this is the root of my question, how does Chocolatey "manage packages" above and beyond what Windows already does with Add/Remove Programs?

roryisok 9y ago
Chocolatey allows you to chain together as many installs as you like, so you can essentially set up whatever apps you want on a system unattended. You could argue it's just a wrapper around the windows installer system but you could equally argue that npm is just a wrapper around javascript files.
moondev 9y ago
Because you can easily automate the process and perform actions with the cli
DavidWoof 9y ago
Chocolatey is scriptable, it handles the downloads, checks the checksums, it's easily searchable, etc. For various reasons I don't use it much anymore, but it's really convenient to go to a new machine after a rebuild and just run a standard script of choco install -y vim; choco install -y python # ...another 20 lines and I'm up and running with all my standard apps. Having to download all those apps, verify the checksums and go through the install wizard can easily take a couple of hours. It's especially useful if you're spinning up a lot of vms.
ChristianGeek 9y ago
The biggest advantage for me is that it gives me a place to check once a week for program updates and handle all updates with one click.
wink 9y ago
Just using a cli command to check for upgrades and apply them is it worth for me for some apps. As not everything is supported, this is only half a solution, but every bit helps. Also, as a maintainer of one package[0] - although it's for developers, apparently sometimes there are problems installing the software on Windows and so it's a bit of effort every release and we can make at least a few users happy. [0]: https://chocolatey.org/packages/Lein/ https://chocolatey.org/packages/Lein/

roryisok 9y ago

Chocolatey allows you to chain together as many installs as you like, so you can essentially set up whatever apps you want on a system unattended. You could argue it's just a wrapper around the windows installer system but you could equally argue that npm is just a wrapper around javascript files.

moondev 9y ago

Because you can easily automate the process and perform actions with the cli

DavidWoof 9y ago

Chocolatey is scriptable, it handles the downloads, checks the checksums, it's easily searchable, etc. For various reasons I don't use it much anymore, but it's really convenient to go to a new machine after a rebuild and just run a standard script of choco install -y vim; choco install -y python # ...another 20 lines and I'm up and running with all my standard apps. Having to download all those apps, verify the checksums and go through the install wizard can easily take a couple of hours. It's especially useful if you're spinning up a lot of vms.

ChristianGeek 9y ago

The biggest advantage for me is that it gives me a place to check once a week for program updates and handle all updates with one click.

wink 9y ago

Just using a cli command to check for upgrades and apply them is it worth for me for some apps. As not everything is supported, this is only half a solution, but every bit helps. Also, as a maintainer of one package[0] - although it's for developers, apparently sometimes there are problems installing the software on Windows and so it's a bit of effort every release and we can make at least a few users happy. [0]: https://chocolatey.org/packages/Lein/ https://chocolatey.org/packages/Lein/