Package Manager for Windows

One of the things I love about Linux is the idea of package management. Most modern distributions use this approach of distributing packages to their users. Debian and Ubuntu have Apt, Red Hat and Fedora have Yum, Gentoo has Portage, SuSE has Yast and Mandriva has Urpmi. In all cases you can install most of the applications you will need for your day-to-day tasks by simply specifying their name. You don’t need to find their website, you don’t need to download an installer, and click Next 17 times. All you do is say _____ install firefox (where the blank can be replaced by apt-get, yum, emerge or urpmi) and a copy of the program is automatically fetched, downloaded and installed in the background as you work. This concept is IMHO the best thing since sliced bread. Hell, it might be the best idea since the invention of toilet paper.

Unfortunately Windows users are doomed to live in a world of tedious, micro-managed installations. Or are they? Some time ago I wrote about a nifty app called InstallPad. InstallPad is not a package manager though – it is an automated application deployment tool which will download and silently install packages in the background. It does not have other package management features such as dependency management (although in Windows environment most applications ship in self contained bundles, so this is not as important), package removal features and etc. It also depended on a local application list defined in an xml file and not a central repository. This means that you are responsible for obtaining the most up-to-date application list.

It also depended on .NET which meant that you still had to go through the lengthy and tedious installation process just to be able to use it. Needles to say my experiment in using InstallPad as a end user automated software deployment platform failed.

WinLibre seems to be a very similar project. Not necessarily a package manager but a deployment tool. The main difference between the two is that WinLibre does not depend on .NET, but also does not have an easily customizable application list. I haven’t tested it, but it seems like a reasonable alternative to InstallPad.

I was pleasantly surprised that there are at least three projects in active development that try to re-create the package manager experience on windows. All do it a little bit differently. Windows Package Manager and AppSnap seem to be inspired by Synaptic and Yast school of thinking – they offer you a nice GUI for managing your software, and dependencies. Windows Package Manager will actually attempt to detect what software you have installed on your computer, as well as fetch a list of applications from the server.

Unfortunately it is still a very buggy and immature piece of software. When I downloaded it and tried testing it on a Win 2k box, I could nod get it to work. The application list would not download, the installed software would not show up on the list and etc. Also, the graphics design seemed very amateurish – the icons looked like they were hand drawn in MS Paint, and the windows had dreadfully awful pastel backgrounds (blue, violet, green – ugh). Needless to say, while the concept behind the application is excellent, the execution is less than satisfactory. I’d keep an eye on this one though. Maybe in a year or two it will evolve into something more stable and usable.

AppSnap on the other hand seems to be somewhat more mature. It is essentially the same idea but in a much better package. Unfortunately AppSnap doesn’t really know what is currently installed on your system – it simply keeps track of what it installed already. Which is not a big problem I guess. The application selection is tad limited too. It has definitely more choices than InstallPad but fewer than win-get.

What is really nice about this manager is that it actually does the job right. It actually attempts to crawl around the download sites trying th detect the most up-to-date version. Also, almost every install and un-install I tried installing with it was done silently in the background. Is it perfect though? No. It’s still buggy.

I had major trouble running the latest 1.3 version on my Win2k box – it kept crashing at startup while looking for appsnap.dll which did not exist. I don’t know why this was happening, but if I wasn’t determined to review it here, I would have given up on it after the second try. Fortunately the previous version (1.2.1) worked just fine.

Since AppSnap does not check the registry for currently installed applications it will happily overwrite your existing software. It will also fail to detect that you have manually uninstalled one of it’s applications manually. So even though it is gone from the system, it will be listed as an installed app in the AppSnap menu.

Despite this I think it is probably the most rounded package manager on the market right now. All it needs is more control over the applications already installed on your system, and it will be a very useful tool. Still, I’m not a big GUI person.

The last project is essentially an imitation of my beloved apt command. Win-get is a command line tool written in Pascal. Pascal? Yes, Pacal. I didn’t think that anyone was still doing active development in that language other than maintenance of existing applications but it seems that people still do (feel free to shoot me down on this, and give examples of brand new Pascal project being launched right now). Anyway, the application uses a central community driven repository which lists direct links to installers, along with silent installation command line switches that should be passed to each of them. The list is built by community members, and everyone is free to contribute and help building the application database.

Win-get downloads the packages using wget and then triggers the installation. Up to that point, it works remarkably like apt-get. Unfortunately it is not aware of applications already installed on your computer. Thus apts remove functionality doesn’t work here. You can easily get that list from the registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall

It should be relatively trivial to implement this, and trigger an appropriate uninstallation program. Unfortunately win-get doesn’t do that. I’d love to contribute this functionality to the project, but hell I don’t feel like figuring out Pascall just to do this.

My other gripe here is not necessarily related to win-get – it is a general complaint. Very few applications offer unatended/silent installation option these days. So you can’t just queue up bunch of apps to be downloaded and installed and then go for lunch. For the most part Apt allows you to do exactly that. There are few exceptions (notably Sun’s Java packages which require explicit license agreements) but in general everything installs seamlessly in the background.

Of course there is not much a package manager author could do about this. Except perhaps ship the manager with AutoIt scripts tailored for each installation package. It could be done, and they could be compiled into self-contained executables, and easily fetched by win-get from the repository.

To summarize – there is no perfect solution here. AppSnap is probably the only package manager I could recommend to a novice user at the moment. But it is still a bit shaky in places. Personally, I like win-get. It is a little rough around the edges but I believe that with a little bit more work it might actually be a kick-ass package manager.