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Comment by blub | Hacker News Reader

Look at windows, how long have we all been screaming from the rooftops that it is garbage? ---

For so long, that Windows actually became good, and that made the screaming irrelevant. I think that's what's going to happen to the iPhone too.

Version 1.0 was pathetic compared to other modern smartphones, but they released early and with each iteration made it better. Even though it is worse to develop for, the phone is getting better and better.

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Windows still doesn't have a coherent way of managing installed applications of various versions, and various degrees of conflict, ie, a package manager and they probably never will... Just saying...

It does. .msi installers act as atomic packages like other systems. Windows doesn't have a centralized system, nor does it enforce the use of msis. But they exist and provide a very nice way of managing resources.

The issue with a centralized system, of course, is licensing. Microsoft can't really have such a system because every developer wants to do their own thing.

They don't enforce .msi any more than debian (or ubuntu) enforce .debs. The lack of centralization just means almost nobody bothers to use msi and just rolls their own self-extracting archive.

The difference is that .msi doesn't handle dependencies, multiple versions or conflicts in a coherant centralized and useful way.

The current structure of the msi installers leaves them much like their exe counterparts. If this is package management then I'm going back to LFS and using make files.

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