Like many other poor souls, I'm still forced to deal with Windows everyday at work. So, I end up using it much more than I would like obviously. Anyway, I just had a thought today and that is: Why hasn't anyone created a package manager for Windows? If I could just do an apt-get install firefox on these Windows machines with all updates being automagically handled by the PM life would be so much simpler. Well, obviously I'm not the first to have this idea as there seems to already be a couple projects under way to do just this. The first one I found is simply called WinPackMan (or the Windows Package Manager), although I've yet to have a chance to try it yet. It appears to still be in an alpha state at the moment though...
If there were a reliable, open-source package manager for Windows, this could really help people transition to the Linux world much easier down the road too. Package installation/management is one the first things new Linux converts will find to complain about when they attempt to make the switch. And it's not really their fault, nor is it the Linux community's fault...we simply do things differently. So, once again... if Windows users started using package managers akin to Apt, Pacman, Yum, Portage (yes Portage can be used for binaries in addition to compiling from source), etc... then things would probably feel alot more natural to them when they make the switch.
Perhaps a more modular/extensible package manager like SmartPM needs to be ported over to Windows? I think it would very much be worth it.
