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Comment by kaba0 | Hacker News Reader

> like software packaged as Wine bottles

I always wondered why there are no wine packages using nix. Sure, it is likely not legal, but I would absolutely love to have an MS office package that mandates a specific hashed file (that I can torrent and add to the nix store - this way I don’t even risk viruses), and the install itself is deterministically done (perhaps with some headless GUI clicking here and there).

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Windows application installers generally are just binary blobs that can do as they please, so just pinning an installer will not imply that the resulting installation will be deterministic - a lot of installers by design change the global state of the system and download stuff during the installation process. If you want packaged on Windows, try choco.

Edit: fixing autocorrect typos.

For what it's worth most of the "packages" on chocolatey are just instructions for downloading those same installers and executing them in their respective silent modes. No one is repackaging those apps except for maybe some of the ones marked as "portable".

You are right in the first approximation, windows application installers can do whatever they want. However, many applications work already if you extract the files from the installer and put them into the appropriate directories, which you can make a deterministic process. There are tools for this, e.g. msiextract.

Should work for portable apps, or anything else that's distributed as an archive that can be directly extracted and work

(So AIUI a tiny fraction of the available software. Still, it's not nothing.)

You could probably wrap Scoop packages into a Wine environment with Nix fairly easily, since all the packages in their main repos are well-behaved, portable, and install non-interactively.

(You probably mean Choco, short for Chocolatey, by the way, just in case anyone gets confused.)

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