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Comment by nlawalker | Hacker News Reader

Honest question - why are people so enthusiastic about Chocolatey? Most packages, including the Fiddler package, just run a small Powershell script that downloads an installer from a known location (in this case https://www.telerik.com/docs/default-source/fiddler/fiddlers...), verifies the checksum and runs it silently. As far as I know, it's all just wrappers on top of stuff that's always existed in Windows Installer. Is it simply the convenience of the chocolatey.org catalog and the ability to avoid visiting a bunch of websites looking for installers? I thought ninite.com had that cornered for most uses.

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People are excited to be rescued from the hell of searching the Internet for a program you want. One of the things that regularly blows the minds of people new to the Linux world is the ability to install anything you can remember the name of.

While Chocolatey isn't quite there yet (it may never given the difficulty of working around Windows), but it is way better than installing 50 programs manually.

Ninite is great for a small selection of apps, but it is not a package manager by any means. For quick setup, yeah it works, but you wouldn't rebuild the installer to install one program, you may as well download the program in the first place.

>> 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?

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.

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/

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.

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.

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

At this point if you are going to the effort of custom installers as with Ninite you might as well switch to building APPX containers (with the Desktop Bridge) and use the Windows Store (and/or Windows Store for Business and/or Add-AppxPackage PowerShell automation).

Personally, I think it's time to converge to APPX and away from semi-proprietary solutions like Chocolatey/Ninite/etc for desktop applications. (I say that as having once been a big Chocolatey fan.)

Is there portable open source tooling to create these packages, like there is for MSI? Can programs installed through Appx packages do everything you can do as a Windows app or is there some form of mandatory sandboxing that would prevent its use for e.g. installing services or setting up credential providers?

The APPX format itself is quite a lot simpler than MSI (APPX is a .ZIP file with a manifest XML file, and typically a code signature), and most major installer project systems that can build an MSI can build an APPX already (including a plugin for the open source WiX toolset and recent versions of many of the most used commercial options).

APPX still encourages UWP apps, but the Desktop Bridge exists for Win32 Desktop applications. For Win32 Desktop applications there is still a small sandbox, but think of it along the lines of "Docker container". The container is there mostly to make install/uninstall clean and reproducible. Win32 applications are otherwise "full privilege" applications to the APIs they used before. The Desktop Bridge stuff itself is partly open source, but definitely not portable, you can download the Desktop App Converter for free on Windows 10 [directly from the Windows Store] and it will Docker-esque use mini-Windows containers to run an existing EXE/MSI install and try to capture what it installs into an APPX package.

I don't think it currently supports installing Win32 services directly, and it definitely doesn't support things like kernel drivers. The focus is mostly on desktop applications. UWP has a powerful background task model that is powerful enough to replace many uses of Win32 Windows services for desktop application needs, and the Desktop Bridge GitHub has samples of communicating between Win32 and UWP pieces.

The full Win32 Office suite has been on the Windows Store in Preview for a couple months now, and it seems pretty clear to me that if Office can be bundled entirely in APPX than most other desktop applications don't have much excuse left.

Thanks, looks useful for Desktop applications and being able to handle it with WiX is nice.

Personally, I'm more interested in system-level programs for integrating Windows with some existing infrastructure.

That's not honest.

- Ninite is not unattended, you have to use a gui.

- Ninite doesn't have a lot of choice and not open to more.

- All package managers only fetch a package, check some hash and run a simple installation process (it's 90% file copy)

- It's enjoyable to most coders to be able to search for and install a package without browsing a website.

- You can use chocolatey locally too, to automate provisioning in a way

Also, I can reasonably trust that the community would flag any issues like getting a malwared version of software. It's sometimes not easy to find official sites for some software and the skeezy download.com style sites are always high on the search engine results.

choco upgrade all

That's the biggest reason, it's easy to upgrade everything at once, not getting nagged but auto updaters when you want to actually use a program, not hunting around the web to check if there are uninstalled updates, etc. The other big convenience is as you said, having everything in a single catalog.

This was going to be my response too. You can update your installed software fairly painlessly[1]. You can do that with Ninite too, but the range of software available with Chocolatey is larger.

[1] Except for the occasional package or two that the maintainers don't keep up to date, which is a shame.

This is similar to how a lot of the homebrew cask packages work on OS X. Ninite appears to be more end-user/consumer focused while chocolatey aims for a wider swath of developer packages as well.

Personally, I use neither because neither is open source. Instead, I use scoop: http://scoop.sh/

“Neither”? Yes, Ninite is closed, e.g. https://ninite.com/help/notfeatures/more.html

But alternatives aren’t:

Chocolatey - Apache license - https://github.com/chocolatey/choco

Homebrew (for Mac) - BSD license - https://github.com/Homebrew/brew

Scoop (as previously mentioned) - Public Domain - https://github.com/lukesampson/scoop

Comparing Scoop to Chocolatey: https://github.com/lukesampson/scoop/wiki/Chocolatey-Compari...

Whoa, thanks.

>> Looking for familiar Unix tools? Tired of Powershell’s Verb-Noun verbosity?

Sold.

Also consider http://0install.net/

Should get a lot more interest IMNHO.

I think you nailed it in your second to last sentence.

It's not often I'm back in the Windows world, but when I am it feels like going back to the early 2000s.. ending up on very skeevy-looking sites trying to hunt the "Download" button that isn't a banner ad. Anything that can take that away is worth it.

An add blocker will take away the banner ads part at least.

Sure, but it's surprising how much Windows software still leans on "file download sites" that do the whole "your file will download in X seconds or click here" nonsense. It's sometimes hard to tell if it's the real/official download unless you backtrack. Very weird compared to Mac software where usually a .dmg is downloaded straight from the creator's own site.

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