Windows Package Manager installing?

Development & Design
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We have various issues on making it easier to install/uninstall on Windows. But I wanted to also note something of interest since we are paying for a Linux packaging guru to help us simplify installations on Linux systems.

For Windows, it seems Microsoft has finally moved in a good direction with their own Windows Package Manager
Which is slowly obsoleting Chocolatey, Scoop, and others.

On Windows 10 and 11, the experience of winget is quite nice since nothing else needs to be pre-installed (unlike Jbang)!

I think our Windows users within institutions will appreciate eventually having easy management like this, since winget is already there on all Windows 10 and 11 systems.
This works even with Windows Store applications, should we also later offer that option.

Anyways, the first step is ensuring that we have a decent Windows Package to begin with (.exe or .msi) and optionally available on the Windows Store.
Then later, users could use winget to install/uninstall from systems.

C:\Users\thadg>winget
Windows Package Manager v1.3.2691
Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

The winget command line utility enables installing applications and other packages from the command line.

usage: winget [<command>] [<options>]

The following commands are available:
  install    Installs the given package
  show       Shows information about a package
  source     Manage sources of packages
  search     Find and show basic info of packages
  list       Display installed packages
  upgrade    Shows and performs available upgrades
  uninstall  Uninstalls the given package
  hash       Helper to hash installer files
  validate   Validates a manifest file
  settings   Open settings or set administrator settings
  features   Shows the status of experimental features
  export     Exports a list of the installed packages
  import     Installs all the packages in a file

For more details on a specific command, pass it the help argument. [-?]

The following options are available:
  -v,--version  Display the version of the tool
  --info        Display general info of the tool

More help can be found at: https://aka.ms/winget-command-help

C:\Users\thadg>winget search openrefine
The `msstore` source requires that you view the following agreements before using.
Terms of Transaction: https://aka.ms/microsoft-store-terms-of-transaction
The source requires the current machine's 2-letter geographic region to be sent to the backend service to function properly (ex. "US").

Do you agree to all the source agreements terms?
[Y] Yes  [N] No: Y
No package found matching input criteria.

C:\Users\thadg>

For those developers interested, you can poke around in Microsoft’s GitHub Repositories such as the winget-pkgs repo and the winget-cli repo.

1 Like
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Thanks Thad! That seems indeed like a move in the right direction, although they seem to be primarily aiming for command-line savvy users. In my opinion OpenRefine should be installable without touching any command line on Windows.

If you have any hints about who could help us improve our Windows packaging, do point them to the blog post of course:

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Oh? I thought that you and Sandra had already identified someone to help out with that, perhaps from Wikimedia land? (and I certainly can help a bit and test as well) But if you haven’t pinned down someone, sure, I’ll put out the word into my network.

Yes, certainly we want an .msi and .exe installer package for ease by Windows users. Institutions, trainers, DevOps, power users, would likely use winget for systematic installation.
I was just posting this topic to let you and others know about Windows Package Manager now which is an official part of the OS tooling instead of 3rd party hacks.

And feel free to move this topic to whichever category or tags you think help.

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