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Comment by cyptus | Hacker News Reader

you can use windows build-in powershell feature "Install-Package" with package provider "chocolatey" just like this on a fresh windows install:

  Set-ExecutionPolicy unrestricted
  Get-PackageProvider -name chocolatey
  Install-Package chromium
  Install-Package 7zip
  ...

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I discovered Chocolatey during a Windows stint at work ~3 years back and found their package quality to be very poor. I'd go as far as saying packages had a 50% chance of leaving you with a usable installation of software.

We ended up changing provisioning scripts to download .msi installers directly and run them with appropriate switches.

I also remember their website having a lot of "maintainers required" notices - I got the impression that the situation was a little desperate.

Has package quality improved? Is Chocolatey a genuinely reliable way to install software, now?

I've been using it since about 2 years and never had any problems installing anything. I guess I'm mostly using popular well-maintained packages though, so YMMV if you are installing some more obscure software.

I'm not sure about the maintainer situation. Some packages get updates quite regularly while other packages are always a few versions behind the latest release.

No. it has only gotten worse. Scoop is the way to go.

I feel like Chocolatey had some good moments early on, but I realized that I stopped using it because I started to feel like I needed to audit every PowerShell installation script it tries to run (and that's the majority of how it operates; the majority of "packages" are just PowerShell scripts that in turn download an MSI from a well known location, checksum it [maybe], and run it), because of all the poorly maintained packages and some increasingly worrisome PowerShell scripts in some of them. Particularly with things like Software Development tools, you could also never tell if a package was "just" a minimal install of the software or some particular developer's preferred kitchen sink, and the package dependency model alone wasn't enough to tell you because it might just be buried in the PowerShell installer directly rather than in the declarative dependencies.

As someone else notes, weirdly Chocolatey's packages seemed to get worse and grow staler after the Kickstarter than before. I guess in hindsight it's about where I stopped feeling an interest in volunteering to help packages, but I'm not sure if it was subconsciously about "what was the Kickstarter money for?" or not. I feel it was more the "kitchen sink" problem that hurt my interest in Chocolatey most directly, because those maintainers would happily sit on the most common name for an application (say, "python") with their kitchen sink, wouldn't take suggestions to better their packages and then you just ended up having to wade through search listings for "slim-python" or "real-python" or "just-python" or "brians-lite-python" or "python-dave13". It stopped feeling like a helpful community and more "every developer for themselves" at that point.

That sounds very neat. Haven't used Windows in ages but likely have to in the future, this might make it more manageable.

Is there any drawbacks to this considering this installation method isn't listed on the installation page on their website?[0]

The closes I found to this installation method was:

"When you have Visual Studio 2010+ and the NuGet extension installed (pre-installed on any newer versions of Visual Studio), you can simply type the following three commands and you will have Chocolatey installed on your machine."

  Install-Package chocolatey
  Initialize-Chocolatey
  Uninstall-Package chocolatey

[0] https://chocolatey.org/install#installing-chocolatey

Warning: chocolatey is bad news. I can’t say if it was ever a decent pkg manager or why it went down the tubes if it was, but maybe it was the offort to monetize it as an already-super-bloated system.

Just run with scoop. It’s very tasteful, and even makes powershell look attractive.

I will second this! I have tried a bunch of them looking for a viable apt-get type solution on my Windows dev machine. On the Mac I can use homebrew, but Chocolatey was nowhere close to homebrew... Scoop is the viable alternative.

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