Last year, in 2009 GSoC, I participated with an organization called Winlibre. The basic idea is having a project similar to Aptitude (or Apt-get) and a GUI like Synaptic but for Windows and just to hold (initially), only open source software. The project was just ok, we finished what we considered was a good starting point but unfortunately, due to different occupations of the developers, the project has been idle almost since GSoC finished. Now, I have some energy, time and interest to try to continue this development. The project was divided in 3 parts: A repository server (which i worked on, and which was going to store and serve packages and files), a package creator for developers, and the main app, which is apt-get and its GUI.
I have been thinking about the project, and the first question that came to my mind is.. actually is this project useful for developers and Windows users? Keep in mind that the idea is to solve dependencies problems, and install packages “cleanly”. I’m not a Windows developer and just a casual user, so i really don’t have a lot of experience on how things are handled there, but as far as I have seen, all installers handle those dependencies. Will windows developers be willing to switch from installers to a packages way of handling installations of Open source Software? Or it’s just ok to create packages for already existing installers?
The packages concept is basically the same as .deb or .rpm files.
I still have some other questions, but basically i would like to make sure that it’s useful in someway to users and Windows developers, and if developers would find this project interesting. If you have any questions, feedback, suggestions or criticisms, please don’t hesitate posting them.
Thanks!!
be sure to research previous efforts on this. Google turns up several similar/relevant efforts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Package_management_system#Microsoft_Windows
http://windows-get.sourceforge.net
http://pina.plasmite.com
IIRC there was an rpm for windows at some point
Also I think there was some guy (who used to work at MS) in the news recently that basically is starting up a very similar project. I can’t find a link to this now.
But anyway, yeah, it would be awesome if there was such a standard tool and repository.