Wednesday 6 August 2008

Windows Install service

One of the things I really like with Linux is the package management tools. I install a new machine and if I want Emacs, I just type one command (apt-get install emacs; yum install emacs; pacman -S emacs; ...) and voila I have it. Now on my windows machine this is a little different. I have to Google the emacs web page. Then look for the Windows binary then look for some gtk port for win32. And this goes on for ever. I am not trying to make a point about open source here. Windows is closed source face it. No it is far more that when installing a Windows machine I have to go off to 20 different web pages and download the install file and then wait till it installs. Why can't I have a little program that does that for me. A list of packages I can install and then I just select n packages and it will go of fetch them and then start the installers. Could add some basic dependency resolution. I suppose you could write a full featured deinstaller too, update mechanism and so on. Everything a nice Linux package manager can do.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

And it must not reinvent the wheel. The underlying package format must be MSI.