.NET Package Management

Question

What are the current proposals for managing .NET packages. What are you using and what are the pros and cons?

The following are some examples:

• Nu
• Openwrap

For the avoidance of doubt, I mean package management systems like gem , apt-get and dpkg .

Answer 1

NuGet (formerly NuPack) is a free, open source package management system for .NET.

• Introducing NuGet Package Manager (Phil Haack)
• Introducing NuPack Package Management for .NET (Scott Hanselman)

Answer 2

Another package manager that is mostly dead these days is Horn . Despite the fact that development has largely stopped, I think it is an interesting project.

Package management required an interesting approach based on compiling the source code instead of relying solely on binary packages, similar to gentoo portage ebuild . This gives the developer maximum freedom to mix and match library versions (unlike the expectation that the mantainers project will officially update its dependencies), but as they say, “with great strength brings great responsibility”, the developer must also make sure that the collector that he compiles , working.

Of course, you could play it safely, and instead of building everything from the trunk, you can fix the dependency versions in your descriptors (for example, there is one descriptor for the Castle Windsor trunk and another for Windsor 2.1 ).

For those who do not want to build everything from the source (which, of course, is a very slow process), there was a server on the hornget.net server that worked as a continuous integration server and provided binary packages.

Answer 3

Since you were referring to machine-oriented package management systems, I thought I would mention chocolatey , which is similar to apt-get, but for Windows.

FYI: I'm one of the Nu / NuGet guys, and I came up with chocolate because I didn’t see what came from Ruby Gems when we switched to NuGet (which were executable type stones, NuGet is really for libraries and source code, not products / tools / applications coming from the other side of the source). Chocolate has since grown to support PowerShell execution, which allows you to do anything on Windows.