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Kinda like apt-get, but for Windows
- kiriappeee 14y agoThat is pretty darn awesome. Kudos given. Downloading now.
- thejosh 14y agoAwesome. The closest thing before this was ninite. Windows really needs a good, clean (and usable for the average computer user) solution similar to apt-get that isn't controlled by someone like Microsoft.
- awestroke 14y agoToo bad windows cmd is so fantastically horrible. This looks like a good project though.
- manojlds 14y agoUse Powershell and ConEmu
- lucian1900 14y agoConsole2 + msys bash is bearable.
- shocks 14y agoPerhaps you will find this useful: https://code.google.com/p/clink/ https://code.google.com/p/clink/
- bliker 14y agoGreat! Now I am using cmd + clink + console2. Very natural solution... I have found powershell to be slower/less responsive for some reason
- seewhat 14y agoAny advice on how to make these 3 tools work together? I scanned the web and experimented today for approx 1 hour but didn't succeed. My general efforts were: (i) injecting clink into the Console2 process (ii) hosting the injected cmd process in Console2.
- bliker 14y agoI actually did nothing special, I just installed clink as executable. Tested it in cmd.exe (you will get the message about running clink). Afterwards added a tab for cmd.exe in console2 and it worked. Whas seems to be a problem for you?
- seewhat 14y agoHi, thanks for the info. The initial difference is that I cannot use the installer due to Windows group policies associated with my account (the PC is not mine to administer). So I've downloaded and extracted the v0.3 zip archive. I manually start clink by running "install_dir\clink inject" in a cmd session and this procedure works correctly. Problems arise when running the same command in a cmd session in Console2. The Console2 process disappears (crashes?) after approx 1 sec, then 10s later the clink executable disappears. Strange behaviour and I may simply drop this and perhaps try again in future once the tool(s) have matured. I hadn't used either Console2 or clink before now; I can get by without them as I'm not a rabid user of the Windows command line. I'll likely casually experiment with them separately.
- RobinBlk7 14y agoTry out ConEmu instead of Console2. It also has clink integration from the box.
- shocks 14y agoGlad you like it! (My brother is the author. :])
- smogzer 14y agoI use pycmd -> http://sourceforge.net/projects/pycmd/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/pycmd/ Also tried console2, and zsh win32 variants i found.
- rplnt 14y agoIt's better but not really great. I just don't understand why it has to run within the cmd environment, which is horrible. I use Git++'s shell as my go-to cmd in windows but that's about the same. Why can't it be a complete application that would emulate the "cdm" under the hood? So I can get the feel of a real (as in anything you install on linux) terminal application.
- shortlived 14y agoTry clink (search on google code), it brings bash to cmd.
- ConstantineXVI 14y agoPowerShell's a massive improvement, but the terminal itself hasn't changed in ages (barely any change since NT4/W95 if I had to guess). There's replacements, but you can't count on arbitrary servers having them installed.
- thresh 14y agoWhat if the user installs VLC (which is horribly outdated there) and then, installed VLC, using internal update mechanisms, gets updated? How will that "system" behave then?
- manojlds 14y agoAs far as Chocolatey is concerned, you still have the originally installed version.
- SideburnsOfDoom 14y agoThe problem that I have with chocolatey is: It's all about the installs. You'd hope that the people doing it would know how installs work. But the default place where chocolatey installs is "C:\chocolatey", and "C:\" is where people who don't understand windows file system layout put things. The docs ( https://github.com/chocolatey/chocolatey/wiki/DefaultChocolateyInstallReasoning https://github.com/chocolatey/chocolatey/wiki/DefaultChocola... ) make a plausible case that this option might be justified sometimes. Saying "we'll always put it somewhere nonstandard because some people might sometimes want to install it when they don't have permissions to put programs where they belong" is unconvincing. The other argument put forward "It's not installed through the registry" (so?) and "it's a Special core component tool" (it's not special to anyone who hasn't installed it yet) are equally weak. This choice of install folder should arguably be allowed. But it's a rubbish default, a poor first impression and undermines confidence that they know what they're doing. It is inexcusable that "C:\Chocolatey" is default and "C:\Program Files\Chocolatey" is a set-up that one does manually.
- nfg 14y agoIME "root of C: drive" default install location is often a sign that software has bugs when run from paths containing space characters.
- SideburnsOfDoom 14y agoYep. That's old-school though, you don't see much of it these days.
- morsch 14y agoSeems to me like having the infrastructure in place is only a first step. It's only as valuable as the packages available within the infrastructure. And having a useful set of up-to-date packages is a huge amount of continuous (!) work. You need a lot of volunteers for that, or, ideally, the cooperation of the upstream developers. It works very well for Ubuntu (and mostly, I think, plain Debian), as the Debian package archives are very good in the first place, and beyond those there is an ecosystem of volunteer or developer maintained PPAs, and beyond those there are individual .debs released by volunteers or devs that you can plug in, sidestepping the server requirement. It's a cultural difference. It took me quite a while to adapt to it when I switched from Windows to Ubuntu; I was extremely sceptical at first, though now I love it.
- zokier 14y agoApparently they are relying on upstream binaries and installers to reduce the package maintainer workload. In my opinion that is a sub-optimal solution.
- deltasquared 14y agoI do not think apt-get means what you think it means. Chocolatey seems to implement a subset of the functions that apt-get is useful for. On Windows if I want to look for system updates, I use Windows update. On Debian I use apt-get. On Windows if I want a library to use on a project, I use NuGet. On Debian I use apt-get. On Windows if I want to install a bunch of free applications, I probably will use ninite, but chocolaty looks like a nice replacement for this. On Debian I use apt-get. That said chocolatey seems like a nice tool for windows.
- skrebbel 14y agoYour point being? The title says "Kinda", after all. It's a good analogy.
- sergiotapia 14y agoNo need to be pedantic. The OP used apt-get as a good enough analogy and got the point across quite clearly. It let's you install things quickly, just like apt-get. "But with apt-get you can perform searches not just exact name ma-" Nope. Don't be pedantic. You got the point, that was the intention.
- Nilzor 14y agoNot only OP. Chocolatey.net uses that analogy themselves on the front page. Which brings me to question why this is news, as the homepage (and the analogy) has been there for quite some while.
- darkchasma 14y agoI don't think you understand what the word "like" means. It is a word used to convey similarities, and not exact sameness. The OP states that chocolatey is LIKE apt-get for Windows, he does not say that choclatey IS apt-get for Windows.
- eric_bullington 14y agoI've had to do some Windows development recently and as someone who switched to Linux 4-5 years ago, package management is what I miss the most (although I miss a whole host of things). I can't believe how much time I lose browsing web sites, downloading packages, unzipping, and click installing them. I look forward to trying this out.
- pmr_ 14y agoSetting up the system once is only half the problem. Most power users have a whole host of links of tools that they will usually need and install on a new machine, but things get really ugly when your stuff gets out of date and the applications don't update themselves. IMO this is the much harder problem that is solved by package-managers. The Windows Way requires each application to replicate some auto-update process which is a great recipe for disaster.
- csense 14y ago> each application to replicate some auto-update process This is one of the reasons that Windows boot takes forever.
- frankblizzard 14y agoI like the project - I used it together with powershell to do frontend development with yeoman on a friends machine. w
- virtualritz 14y ago2013 -- the year Windows gets a "package manager".
- suhair 14y agoThis was released at least 2 years back (http://nuget.org/packages/chocolatey http://nuget.org/packages/chocolatey)
- ygra 14y agoWindows Installer is a package manager, in a way (it keeps track and manages installed packages – it doesn't help you find them, though). Edit: It doesn't track dependencies, though, which probably makes it less useful for that purpose.
- nemo1618 14y agoYou mean the Windows 8 Store?
- metachris 14y agoI think it's problematic that the package list on the chocolatey website doesn't show the version numbers of the apps. If I install that Python package, would it be 2.7.3, 3.2, or another one? Ninite does this well on their website.
- gep13 14y agoThe version number is clearly visible on the website: http://chocolatey.org/packages/python http://chocolatey.org/packages/python
- dave1010uk 14y agoAlso interesting is Ninite [1], which lets you create a lightweight installer .exe to download and install multiple applications (e.g. Skype, Chrome, iTunes). Whilst along the same lines as Chocolatey, Ninite seems to be aimed more at "apps" than "packages" and is something you could save on a USB stick or send to less tech-savy people. [1] http://ninite.com/ http://ninite.com/
- j-kidd 14y agoJust read the Chocolatey vs Ninite comparison [1]. For me, the biggest selling point of Chocolatey is its decentralized nature, making it useful for enterprisey deployment. [1] https://github.com/chocolatey/chocolatey/wiki/ChocolateyVsNinite https://github.com/chocolatey/chocolatey/wiki/ChocolateyVsNi...
- kijin 14y agoWhat's the difference between "git" and "git.install", or between "7zip" and "7zip.install"? It seems that there's a dependence between the bare-named package and the "install" package, but the package description doesn't explain which one I should use if I just want the familiar app.
- gep13 14y agoHave a look here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/chocolatey/odIIsCLfww8/bDOqqXY8sVwJ https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/chocolatey/odIIsCLfww8... Gary
- e40 14y agoWhy is there a git.install and a git? The descriptions don't seem different. notepadplusplus also has two flavors. That should be explained in the description.
- gep13 14y agoHave a look here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/chocolatey/odIIsCLfww8/bDOqqXY8sVwJ https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/chocolatey/odIIsCLfww8...
- slajax 14y agoThe "easy install" is barely tweet-able its so long. Man I'm thankful for curl x | sh. Nice work on this but it has a major flaw. Windows.
- cnlwsu 14y agoThe important question... Can I bundle an Ask toolbar with my package?
- motoford 14y agoUnfortunately yes. I used chocolaty to install speccy and got Google Chrome and Google Toolbar installed -- silently.