[…] there already is one. What a coincidence. It’s not perfect, but it is functional which is more than could be said about it’s predecessors. In fact it is robust enough that we now have BoxStarter which is a service that lets you build […]

Well AppSnap seems nice. I’ll try it.

Hello,
I’m the author of AppSnap and would be happy to resolve the crash issue you saw with 1.3.0 on W2k. I’d greatly appreciate it if you could send me more details on the failure.

Also, I’m almost done with 1.3.1 which now detects installed applications, among several other improvements which you can read about here:-

http://appsnap.genotrance.com/#%5B%5BVersion%201.3.1%20Changelog%5D%5D

Thanks for your review and support.

I found this very interesting to read since I am looking for a usable deployment tool for times now.

Especially complicated is that my favourites Firefox and Thunderbird do not come with appropriate remote deployment capabilities (I am managing a few small networks in my spare time, but my professional job is doing Tivoli systems management, and it has a great configuration management tool). Currently my FF and TB installation simply drop down alle the files from a snapshot, then delivering customized config files for each user ;(. I abandoned the “silent install” approach with the original .exe completely.

If there’s not one definitive API for complete deployment and all software adheres to that the windows world will continue to suffer poor application management.

Same is still true for package management on linux: all of the tools out there deliver a software, but it’s not functional. You still need to crawl into places and edit all those files, be it in /etc, /opt/etc, /usr/local/samba/lib, /var/spool/hylafax/etc and so on. Every package has its own way of doing things. Terrible!

Chris, I saw wpkg but it is more of a rapid deployment tool rather than a package manager. From what I saw you install it, set it up to pull a list of applications from somewhere on the network, then reboot and wait for it to download and install everything.

The PSI also doesn’t look like package manager. But thanks for posting them.

I haven’t tested either of these as I’ve just recently come across them:

http://wpkg.org/
WPKG is an automated software deployment, upgrade and removal program for Windows.

https://psi.secunia.com/
The Secunia PSI detects installed software and categorises your software as either Insecure, End-of-Life, or Up-To-Date. Effectively enabling you to focus your attention on software installations where more secure versions are available from the vendors.

Reading the “doesn’t know what’s currently installed” part on AppSnap.. how could they not have put that in? It has to be one of the easiest bits of information to extract from a machine besides “what OS is this”

Possibly even easier if you want a really detailed answer to the OS question – version/build numbers and such

Anyway, they are crazy.

I just keep a folder full of the little installer files, I can run through pretty much everything pretty quickly since they’re all just a case of ok-ok-agree-yes-install-untick the “restart now” box-done, not really a good idea for mass-installing onto multiple machines though