Windows Package Manager Preview

Re:Windows Package Manager Preview by open-paren on Tuesday May 19, 2020 @12:19PM (#23236631)

This[1] is the repository from which it pulls. It sounds like third-party repos are a planned feature. Basically, every package is a yaml file like this:

  Id: string # publisher.package format
  Publisher: string # the name of the publisher
  Name: string # the name of the application
  Version: string # version numbering format
  License: string # the open source license or copyright
  InstallerType: string # enumeration of supported installer types (exe, msi, msix)
  Installers:
    - Arch: string # enumeration of supported architectures
      URL: string # path to download installation file
      Sha256: string # SHA256 calculated from installer
  # ManifestVersion: 0.1.0

Doesn't look like there is field for dependencies of a package, but this is also a 0.1.0 release.

[1]: https://github.com/microsoft/winget-pkgs

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Re:Windows Package Manager Preview by DaiPlusPlus on Tuesday May 19, 2020 @12:28PM (#23236769)

YAML? That’s very surprising to me (I grew up in the XML-for-everything days). Would this be the first-ever first-party Microsoft project to use YAML?

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Re:Windows Package Manager Preview by febstar on Tuesday May 19, 2020 @12:33PM (#23236855)

Azure (DevOps) Pipelines use YAML. Not sure if that counts?

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Re:Windows Package Manager Preview by modernerd on Tuesday May 19, 2020 @02:40PM (#23238457)

Not sure about YAML, but I was happy to see Windows Terminal use JSON for configuration instead of XML.

https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/blob/master/doc/user-d...

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Re:Windows Package Manager Preview by lillesvin on Tuesday May 19, 2020 @02:55PM (#23238673)

VS Code also uses JSON for configuration, IIRC.

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Re:Windows Package Manager Preview by modernerd on Tuesday May 19, 2020 @05:43PM (#23240645)

Yes, it uses jsonc (“JSON with Comments”), which is even better. :-)

https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/languages/json

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Re:Windows Package Manager Preview by Xelbair on Tuesday May 19, 2020 @03:07PM (#23238801)

using anything white-space delimited, or as verbose as XML for configuration should be forbidden.

Preferably use something as simple as TOML, or even just plain JSON.

Indentation is pain in the ass to work with in huge files and with editors that do not support autoindent(which occasionally you have to use) - especially if the comments do not follow the indentation.

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Re:Windows Package Manager Preview by yNeolh on Tuesday May 19, 2020 @04:04PM (#23239487)

As far as I know, YAML 1.2 I think, is a superset of JSON so you could still use both. But maybe they use an older version or a custom parser...

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Re:Windows Package Manager Preview by techntoke on Tuesday May 19, 2020 @12:33PM (#23236856)

Similar to a PKGBUILD file for Arch. It is 2020 and like WSL, it will probably take at least 2 iterations and 3 more years before this half-works and honestly as much as I want this to be successful they will have to create an entirely different package format for it to. Like EXE installers are so unpredictable already and Chocolatey does okay but packages frequently get broken and many of them are unmaintained.

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Re:Windows Package Manager Preview by open-paren on Tuesday May 19, 2020 @12:38PM (#23236918)

At least having the package repo in a git repo removes the biggest problem (IMO) with Chocolatey, that a package owner would abandon it then never update it. Now, a package can be updated by anyone through a PR. However, whoever maintains the git repo (Kevin Larkin and some others) is likely to be overwhelmed quickly.

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Re:Windows Package Manager Preview by techntoke on Tuesday May 19, 2020 @12:48PM (#23237017)

That is sort of how Chocolatey works already. You can modify any of their abandoned packages and submit a request to become owner. They still need to have admins or package authors maintaining packages though in order to ensure the hashes are correct. Otherwise if anyone can make a change then it will become ripe with viruses and malware.

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