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Microsoft Operating Systems Windows

Microsoft Debuts Windows Package Manager For Your Dev Environment (venturebeat.com) 50

Posted by BeauHD from the new-and-improved dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: It's finally happening. Microsoft is giving developers a command line interface to install their favorite tools. That's right -- at Build 2020 today, Microsoft announced Windows Package Manager in preview. This is not simply about helping developers build for Windows. It's about helping developers and businesses embrace Windows. Microsoft is on a mission to get developers to love using Windows over macOS and Linux. Part of that mission involves releasing tools like Windows Terminal for enterprises and improving WSL for anyone who needs Linux while they code. Another part is helping developers (and IT admins) set up their Windows environments as effortlessly as possible. In a similar vein, Microsoft today also threw in highly requested features for PowerToys: Run and Keyboard Remapper. But the former is definitely the bigger news.

Windows Package Manager is a command line interface for searching, viewing, and installing commonly used developer tools. Developers list their applications in a GitHub repository; the package manager grabs and installs them. Even better, Windows Package Manager is open source -- Microsoft is asking for developers to help improve it.
In a briefing ahead of Build 2020, Microsoft partner program manager Scott Hanselman laid out the vision: "You've just joined a company and they give you the onboarding document. They give you some ridiculous Word document and they're like 'Here, onboard.' It's like, 'Install this. Set that up.' And honestly, they don't expect you to get any work done for at least a couple of months. They say, 'Get ready by the end of the week.' They're lying. You got to set up all this equipment. It's a huge hassle.

What if you could have the Windows Package Manager? And you could say 'winget install Terminal, winget install Visual Studio.' Boom, boom, boom. What if I could give you a script that just sets your machine up? You got all the stuff that you need. That's one thing. Then they say, 'Well, get the source code now.' They say that. 'Bring the source code down and compile it. Just compile it.' Never works that way.

What I want to do is, I want to say, I want to join your area. I want to join your space. There's a code space of yours I want to enter. There is a best practice. There is a series of tools that we want to get. And I'm going to go and say, 'Give me those tools.' I'm going to enter that code space, we're going to spin up a container in the cloud, pull that code down from GitHub, and you now have an area in the cloud that is representative of the best practices of the company, and you could really be coding within a few minutes. Literally, people say that. Like, 10 minutes, and you're up and running. And that's really something I've never seen before, and I've been doing this for 30 years."
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Microsoft Debuts Windows Package Manager For Your Dev Environment More

Microsoft Debuts Windows Package Manager For Your Dev Environment

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  • will users have update control or will be windows 10 like forced updates?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by MobyDisk ( 75490 )

      It seems to be a CLI, so I don't see how it could auto-update.

      • Wake up Neo...
        The Microsoft Matrix has you :-)
        Windows...Linux...Patents...LinkedIn...Github...Azure...Surface...Gaming...Media...

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by wfj2fd ( 4643467 )
        After the initial install, services are often run in the background that will auto update packages. Common practice. Or the application can check for updates on startup and refuse to run if not updated.

  • Spyware usuage... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by The New Guy 2.0 ( 3497907 ) on Tuesday May 19, 2020 @09:03PM (#60080682)

    What's there to prevent this from being used by spyware?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by MobyDisk ( 75490 )

      It is open source.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by recjhl ( 840587 )

      What's there to prevent this from being used by spyware?

      Nothing at all.

    • Re:Spyware usuage... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by bitwraith ( 5044201 ) on Wednesday May 20, 2020 @03:06AM (#60081262)

      What's there to prevent this from being used by spyware?

      I hate to stand up for Microsoft here, but package managers are actually much safer from a security standpoint than the mess Windows has now. Having multiple installers/uninstallers/updaters as Windows systems do now means many more points of potential vulnerability than one unified system, so if this leads to the eventual death of self-installer EXEs or update service bloatware, it's a good thing. This also means that the package manager will tend to guide users to a curated, "safe," source of packages, as opposed to randomly pulling installers from Tucows and hoping they don't have malware in them. Most importantly, if you're running vulnerable programs with enough permissions to use a package manager, or you have privilege escalation holes, you have bigger problems and it's likely your fault when you get hosed.

      The real question here is not whether this makes your spyware/malware situation worse (it doesn't), it's why anyone who cares about malware doesn't think Windows is already too radioactive for this to matter.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Nothing, same as every other package manager. Caveat emptor.

      That's the fundamental weakness of all package managers and app stores. You must trust the people running them to protect you.

      By the way, the github page says that the version in the Windows Store has telemetry but if you built it from source it doesn't. Or use Chocolatey instead.

  • So Linux was right all along? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    That seems like a serious turn for Microsoft especially after their Get The Facts campaigns. They are even switching to services and support for income like other open source companies.

  • Linux and BSD have been doing this better for over 20 years. Linux distros juggle multiple package sources and package versions, with recursive dependency checks that can install a whole GUI or similar subsystem based on the one package you asked for which requires it. See Debian for an example of a distro that did all of this in 1998, and they may not have been the first. If we look forward a few years to 2000 and the release of Gentoo, there is even customization of compile-time features (global and local

    • Linux distros juggle multiple package sources and package versions, with recursive dependency checks that can install a whole GUI or similar subsystem based on the one package you asked for which requires it. See Debian for an example of a distro that did all of this in 1998, and they may not have been the first. I

      Just to clarify, I mean Debian did all of the additional things I described in 1998 with the introduction of apt. The basic functionality that Microsoft has achieved came to Linux distros by 1993.

  • What about chocolatey? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MobyDisk ( 75490 ) on Tuesday May 19, 2020 @09:57PM (#60080764) Homepage

    I thought chocolatey was the package manager for Windows. I actually just installed the Windows Terminal using it, thinking I was doing the latest thing. Looks like I was about 45 minutes behind!

    • Re:What about chocolatey? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by grep -v '.*' * ( 780312 ) on Tuesday May 19, 2020 @11:32PM (#60080896)
      Chocolatey isn't official. Only Official Microsoft Licensed Software needs to operate on Microsoft Systems.
      Anything else is a virus / poor imitation / not-as-good / please don't install that / Shane! Come back!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Chocolatey is a third party app.

      Microsoft doesn't want to have to rely on a third party to provide a package manager. By making their own they can integrate it into all their tutorials and workflows without worrying that one day Chocolatey will break something or give up.

      I'm a little surprised they didn't just buy Chololatey but they must have decided they could do a better job somehow.

    • OneGet is the MS version of Chocolatey, handled with the PackageManagement powershell module.

      Which is related to NuGet, the package manager Visual Studio already has.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by MobyDisk ( 75490 )

        Microsoft is worse than Google at this game of "how many of the same product can we make?" Their latest one seems to be that they are adding features to github that are just like Azure Devops. I can see in 5 years them having to merge the two projects.

    • No it's cygwin (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Cygwin is the Windows Package Manager.

  • It's finally happening. Microsoft is giving developers a command line interface to install their favorite tools.

    Am I reading this right, Microsoft now supports Emacs?

  • "Microsoft announced Windows Package Manager in preview...It's about helping developers and businesses embrace Windows."

    Hey Microsoft, I got a package you can embrace right here.

  • Is it called vcpkg? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by mejustme ( 900516 ) on Wednesday May 20, 2020 @01:36AM (#60081128)

    Is this the official announcement of vcpkg? (Which, I must admit, is amazing when I have to do development work on Windows.) Or is this still yet another replacement for vcpkg? chocolatey? npackd? scoop? oneget?

    There are too many of these for Windows, some of which like vcpkg are actually MS products, and no consensus as to which one we should concentrate our efforts into using+supporting.

    (Note that Linux has similar issues, but the fragmentation is different -- along distros -- and the turnover rate is lower. So while someone generally knows if they should be using rpm over apt/dpkg, we do have situations on Ubuntu for example where there is some ambiguity over whether someone should be using apt vs snap.)

  • you are bound to re-invent it. Badly" -- Old saying on the Internet. :)

    But hey, better than nothing! At least rhey are trying to go in the right direction. ... many decades later.

    I just wish I had a time machine, so I could show 90s Bill Gates and Ballmer 2030s Windows, when it will have become basically Microsoft Linux. ;)
    And it will not be called Linux, obviously, to not taint its name by giving it to somethig for noobs aka "on the desktop"! :)

  • Lovin' Windows? (Score:3)

    by codeButcher ( 223668 ) on Wednesday May 20, 2020 @08:38AM (#60081888)

    Microsoft is on a mission to get developers to love using Windows over macOS and Linux.

    It might help if they removed all that bandwidth-hungriness, telemetry, eye-candy ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H eye-molasses, and inane "we know exactly what you want to do" dialogs and help screens. Did I mention telemetry? O yes, I did...

    It's not the lack of package managers that make me love Linux, for all its warts and foibles.

  • "Microsoft is on a mission to get developers to love using Windows over macOS and Linux."

    Well, they should start at the bottom and work their way up. Just yesterday my Windows box failed to wake from sleep; then, after a forced reboot, parts of my profile were borked.

    I'm not going to love their OS until I can use it for extended periods without it making me cringe. Focus on stability MS, then focus on making it do what I want, when I want, without getting in my way. Then make all parts of it fast and respon

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