Winget: Windows' New Native Package Manager

[tajmone]

Microsoft announced winget, the new native Windows Package Manager, soon to be natively included in Win 10:

• MS Dev Blog » Windows Package Manager 1.0

It would be nice to provide a winget package for the ALAN SDKs (Beta and Alpha) and WinArun, especially if the package could also be used inside repositories to install/update both SDKs into specific folders, thus enabling toolchain scripts to auto-update the Beta and Alpha SDK to specific required versions which can the be used according to branch (i.e. Beta for main branch and Alpha for all dev branches).

E.g. in the StdLib repository we always use the latest Beta for master branch (to build the examples and dynamically extract their transcripts for the documentation), whereas on the dev branches we use specific Alpha versions, prepending the next StdLib release to work with the next Alan Beta.

Currently, we don't have an automated solution to install specific SDKs in the repository, and this has to be done manually. A scripted solution that could automatically download a specific SDK release and extract its binaries to a custom folder within the repository would greatly improve the workflow, since we could then store an ALAN_BETA and an ALAN_ALPHA text file in the repo root, containing the SDK version required for Beta and Alpha build respectively, and let the script handle the updates and setup in the background at each build's preliminary stage.

Now that MS has finally produced its own official package manager, providing a cross-platform solution for the ALAN SDK becomes feasible — with Linux and macOS having their package manager — whereas in the past the only options for Windows were third party solutions like Chocolatey, scoop, etc., which required non-native dependencies.