Make installing free software for Windows a snap

By Matthew Newton, PC World, 08/29/07

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A couple of weeks ago, my colleague Wil Shultz, one of the Unixy sysadmins who keeps this very Web site up and running, sent me a link to a Windows utility called Win-get. Its author describes this tool as "an automated install system and software repository for Microsoft Windows" and also says that "the ideas for its creation come from apt-get and other related tools for the 'nix platforms."

Apt-get and those "other related tools" are package management tools, an integral part of any Linux system. Imagine an amalgam of Windows Update and the Add/Remove Programs applet in the Windows Control Panel; now imagine that the combined program dealt not just with OS components, but with all the software on your system. Linux users don't have to imagine; their package manager is that program.

Apt-get is the command-line package manager on Debian and Ubuntu Linuxes, and it is the subject of many a geeky paean -- it's just that fantastic. So my initial reaction to Win-get was something like, "An apt-get for Windows? Inconceivable!"

Well, I can now report that, though it isn't exactly what Linux folks think of as a package manager, Win-get does provide enough of the same convenience that Linux package managers do that from here on out it will live on any Windows machine I have to work with regularly.

One reason I initially had doubts about Win-get is that the concept of a package manager doesn't translate well outside the ecosystem of free software and open source. On my Ubuntu system, every six months, my package manager tells me that it has new versions of the OpenOffice.org suite and the Gimp (not to mention practically everything else I've installed on my machine) ready to download and install, gratis. Can you imagine a day when some Windows OS applet in the system tray will let you know that new versions of Photoshop are ready and waiting to come screaming down the pipe to you?

Perhaps, but that day is still far in the future -- and when it dawns, you will of course be asked to produce your credit-card number. Ultimately, Linux-style package management, with its efficient, system-wide, free software updates, is anathema to commercial software vendors, which need to keep you on their upgrade treadmills, picking up the latest overmarketed, underperforming antivirus product in a shiny cardboard box every year just to stay current, and so forth. So wouldn't attempting to introduce package management on Windows be akin to putting lipstick on a pig?

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