[wpkg-users] Chocolatey?

Mon Nov 3 22:36:51 CET 2014

Hi Marco,

Apologies for the rather rubbish word-wrapping. Office 2013 doesn't appear to be any
better than Office 2010 :-(

> -----Original Message-----
> From: wpkg-users [mailto:wpkg-users-bounces at lists.wpkg.org] On Behalf
> Of Marco Schmidt
> Sent: 02 November 2014 11:37
> To: wpkg-users at lists.wpkg.org
> Subject: Re: [wpkg-users] Chocolatey?
> 
> At least my small list started a small discussion.
>
  It's a great discussion that needs to happen someday. I think that the sooner it happens, the better it will be for WPKG's
longevity.  I'd really love to see WPKG grow to put the other vendors to shame. It's going to be hard to find coding time but
I think it's definitely a good thing to float your list  out there as questions to thinking about to give WPKG a bright future.

> 
> After I read the article from Heise (c't 7/2014 p.176) I can give you some
> additional technical infos/differences to WPKG. Maybe I will be wrong at
> some points, please feel free to correct me and add your knowledge.
> 
> I will number the differences for better reference in the responses (not for
> ranking!!).
> I will try to list them without putting a positive or negative classification on
> them, because this depends on your special environment/needs.
>

 I'm glad you're being neutral on the classifications. I'll try to follow suit with some classic devil's advocate
thinking to spur people to look at each product and compare and contrast their approaches with some good
questions in their heads. I like chocolately but I'm not entirely sure it's in the same arena as WPKG. It's difficult
to compare them. There's some essence of chalk and chees to think about.

> 
> 1. Chocolatey has a central external repository which is maintained by a
> community - WPKG has a individual repository which needs to be filled by
> each admin manually (some script example are in the wiki).
>

 From my perspective there's some questions people should be asking themselves here.

 A central repository idea comes with risks and benefits alike;
   - Are the packages trustworthy? Google, Apple and Microsoft have a lot of trouble policing their
	app stores, chocolateley folks might have the same issues coming.
   - Are the packages apt for your environment? Just because there's a package listed it might not
	work for your environment or offer the facilities you need
   - Will the packages be consistently maintained? There might be very simple issues where a vendor
	changes their product and breaks a chocolatey package or a maintainer walks away.
   - Do the packages work together nicely? A package that is defined to pull in other dependencies
	might not work with another differently coded one.
   - Is there a guarantee that the repository will stay free? Okay. Hands up here! That's a slightly biased
	question as it appears that you have to pay to use Chocolatey if you want to use private
	repositories (if I'm reading the documentation correctly). It might not be long before altruism
	goes out the window for the public repository :-(
   - Do you use site-licensed products rather than open source? Site-licensing is something will cause
	headaches for submissions to the chocolately repositories.
   - Will you gain from the expertise of others? It saves a lot of time if you don't have to re-invent the
	wheel but that might cost individuals learning something.   

> 
> 2. Chocolatey is made for "manual" install - WPKG has a service running on
> startup for automatically install/update packages.
> 

 The key thinking is pretty much summed up in one question here ;-)

Do you need a hands-on programmatic installation system for use by admin staff or
an automatic deployment system? - There are slight differences in the ideas.

>
> 3. WPKG has a central configuration which packages should be installed on
> which host - Chocolatey need to be embedded in additional tools to achieve
> this (Chef,Puppet, WPKG).
> 

More key thinking here. It's slightly not quite the point you're making here but... :-)

- Do you need a bare-metal system or can you afford to prepare machines? Getting
deployment systems working on bare-metal system can have major boons.

> Greetings ...
>   Marco
> 

 ...and here comes the personal thoughts :-)

 Personally, I can only vouch that, in my head, WPKG does a job that is clean, pure and has so few
initial needs that I have grown to love it for its stability, integrity and simplicity in deployment.
Its ethos, delivery and support are without par because of the work of its main crew and 
contributors.  Chocolateley adds some large features for managing lots of other things but it
seems bitty and not as clearly thought out enough to be as simple and effective as WPKG. In
my daily life, I don't really need to be bulk installing Ruby gems or Python add-ins to a desktop.
I want to have a system handling Office Pro installs, running one-off jobs and saving me writing
my own infrastructure of libraries (as I would have to if I was using Altiris or MSSC for software
deployment). WPKG works out-of-the-box on many levels.

 Having said that, it would be great for WPKG to dip its toes into the world of compiled code.
Theoretically, porting wpkg.js to JScript.NET would open a lot of doors for WPKG Client and WPKG
GPO to be integrated directly. It would need a lot of team work, commitment to change and easing
in the idea of there being a requirement to install the .NET framework into the bare-metal concepts
but compared to chocolately needs that's a minor commitment to keep WPKG far ahead of the crowd.

Regards,

Keith

PS: Besides, I object to the name chocolateley purely on the difficulty of remembering how to spell it.

Chocolatey...chocolateley...chocol8ly...chocolatelly.... dammit...wpkg is so much simpler to spell :-)

> On 31.10.2014 18:44, Marco Schmidt wrote:
> >  From my point of view:
> >
> > 1. Chocolatery is under active development/support 2. Chocolatery has
> > a huge community 3. Chocolatery uses "modern" powershell
> >
> > I am sorry to say, but I guess, the days of WPKG are counted.
> >
> > Greetings ...
> >   Marco
> >
> >
> > On 31.10.2014 13:44, Jon Goldberg wrote:
> >> We've been using wpkg here for several years; a new hire said that
> >> they previously used Chocolatey to perform similar functions.
> >>
> >> Has anyone evaluated wpkg vs. Chocolatey and come to any conclusions?
> >> Is anyone using them together?
> >>
> >> Jon
> >>
> >>
> >>
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