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Comment by chemodax | Hacker News Reader

Maybe an unpopular opinion, but I am missing the old Microsoft these days. How did we end up in the world where technologies like Windows Installer are replaced with PowerShell scripts that downloads software from the Internet?

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Writing a script has always been simpler than making a proper installer, because you need to adhere to various transactional rules, implement a proper rollback mechanism, worry about making your components have correct keys that still work after an upgrade. And e.g. if you need to install a Windows service, most of the standard options (even those provided by Wix) don't cover all cases out of the box. So to some extent using a script means replacing a more complex, but complete solution with an ad-hoc thing that may work in general, but fails a lot of corner cases.

One quite convenient thing is that Windows Installer packages can be installed via Group Policy, making deployment for new nodes work like a charm. How is a sysadmin supposed do this with scripts?

Also it takes quite a lot of effort to understand how windows installers work because it’s far from intuitive and you get to learn all those tools that make no sense. This is not something that a person working on project like docker itself for example would want to spend their time on. They’d rather make a script than an MSI.

What has changed since these days of Microsoft? I’m pretty sure when it came to setting up complicated systems, you had to follow a 158 pages document with all dialogs you had to click to (if you’re lucky enough to have a document like this)

In this sense a predictable powershell script is IMO an improvement

May be it's a fashion? Like using Electron/Edge for Start Menu.

Haha, I might have written almost the same thing but late by 2 minutes :)

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