From http://betanews.com/2013/03/20/chocolatey-uses-powershell-command-line-to-keep-software-up-to-date/: Home page: https://chocolatey.org/.
Hmm. You know, last year I probably would have said this was awesome and seriously overdue; but now I'm not sure I see the point. - Windows is already a pretty complete software distribution - Dependency problems are very rare unless you're compiling stuff - EXE and MSI installers pretty much handle things themselves - A lot of server and workstation stuff wouldn't typically be in the repo anyway - You still need to handle lots and lots of proprietary software, which is often specialized and irreplaceable What's missing from this picture IMO isn't a unified package manager for just installing stuff, but a scripting language for automating tedious tasks, including installation. I'm not a Windows sysadmin though, so I actually have no idea whether Windows has anything filling that role. (Batch scripts look pretty quirky and limited, VBScript seems more like the Windows equivalent of Perl, and Powershell more like Python or some other object-oriented scripting language, but really I don't know. I'd be interested in comments on this from Windows admins.) Edit: not as if Windows has a dearth of scripting languages though. Even stuff like Node.JS and PHP can be used for administrative scripting tasks...
So, this is just a Linux-like repository for Windows/ Not too bad of an idea if you leave out all of the security issues. I am quite alright doing it the old-fashioned way though.
You can create your own Chocolatey packages also - see Apt Windows: Let’s Get Chocolatey! Part 2 : Multiple Installs and Package Creation.
