Epic bug: Please support my favorite package manager!

[bitspittle]

In order to avoid everyone creating one off bugs for the same package manager, this bug will act as a home to collect all such requests received so far. (Of course, once someone starts working on adding support for one of them, that could be a good time to create an individual bug).

Here is the current list of package managers we are considering (but not actively working on):

• apt
• chocolatey
• flatpak
• gofish
• macports
• rpm
• snapcraft
• spec
• winget

---

NOTE: Some of these package managers may never get supported, as I'm not sure how many people actually want to use them, and supporting more releases results in more work on our end.

So even if you see your package manager on this list, it still may be worth leaving a comment below like "Yes, I want that one please! I use it particularly because..."

If you see a comment below from someone expressing support for a package manager that you also want, please give their comment a thumbs up so we can better roughly understand what people are using.

[russellbanks]

It would be nice to have this on Winget! Currently however, Winget doesn't accept zip files but rather installers so we'd have to either wait until they do support zip files (it's an open issue) or create an executable (exe or msi).

[bitspittle]

Thank you @russellbanks for your comment. I updated the initial list to include winget.

Hmmm, it might be possible to create an exe... but at that point I think I would be bundling a jre which might balloon the final size a bit, which may be unfortunate since to use Kobweb the user pretty has to have Java installed on their machine already.

Hopefully, though, winget decides to support .zip files. It is so convenient and would reduce so much friction!

[russellbanks]

I'm not the most well-versed in packaging JVM applications (in terms of bundling the JRE, etc) but is it possible to create an executable without bundling the JRE? If this is not feasible, we could just bite the bullet and bundle the JRE with it, specifying that the recommended option is still the zip file?

Even if this is a temporary solution, I still think I would be advantageous to look into ways we can get an executable working in order to get this on Winget as it is the official package manager for Windows.

P.S. Just a correction to the updated initial list - the link for Winget is https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli.

[bitspittle]

@russellbanks Thanks for letting me know about the wrong link. I fixed the original comment.

Even if we could build an .exe, just keep in mind I'd want a flow where this could all be done automatically every time I released a new version. With existing package managers, this is basically a one click operation for all of them so far. So we'd need to figure out how to automatically 1) unzip the file, 2) bundle it up into an exe, 3) and publish this to winget.

I personally won't have time to look into this for quite a while, but if someone knows how to do it, and/or has an example of this happening already, please add a comment -- that could help a lot!

P.S. Russell, you may want to check out the https://github.com/jreleaser/jreleaser project and file an issue with them to support winget. I'm relying on them pretty heavily for my other releases, and if winget is the official package manager for windows, they may be interested in getting some signal that people would want it supported.

[russellbanks]

Not much more I can comment on this other than I hope that either Winget supports zip files in the future or JReleaser adds support for Winget. There is an open issue on JReleaser already to ask for support for winget as a packager, but it doesn't seem to have any activity.

[bitspittle]

Great, thanks for the update! With JReleaser leading the way, I will definitely take a look.

…

On Fri, 6 May 2022 at 10:12, Begula ***@***.***> wrote: JReleaser now has an MSI installer which can be published to WinGet. I think we can now proceed. — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#11>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AKNONAWHPPHGI6JK3EKE66TVIVHINANCNFSM5NJWQPUQ> . You are receiving this because you authored the thread.Message ID: ***@***.***>

[russellbanks]

As of winget 1.4, there will be support for installing zip files. However, this is just a preview at the moment, with the stable version being 1.3. But, this means that Kobweb can be put on winget; it's just a matter of time.

[aalmiray]

FWIW you can use jpackage (on its own or via JReleaser) to create Windows installers (exe, msi) that may be used in combination with Winget.

[bitspittle]

(Sorry for the recent radio silence, folks. I just moved, which wiped out my schedule for a couple of weeks).

As I catch up on stuff, I do intend to look into Winget, although I have a few other priorities to get through first. I'm hoping to get to this by end of September ('22) at the very latest, so feel free to ping this bug if it's later with no progress.

[bitspittle]

Finally, I'm back to this bug and looking into adding winget support. Thanks again for everyone's patience.

@aalmiray I'm trying to follow the Gradle syntax for jpackage from here: https://jreleaser.org/guide/latest/reference/assemble/jpackage.html

but "jpackage" contents aren't autocompleting for me:

(I'm using latest, Jreleaser v1.5.0)

I'm using kotlin script BTW. Maybe "app" is some dynamic thing that works only in groovy scripts?

Is there any demo code for using jreleaser + jpackage I can look at?

Also, according to @russellbanks , winget should support .zip files now (1.4 was released in Jan). Are there plans to add support for that into JReleaser, or will jpackageing be the way to go for a while?

[russellbanks]

@bitspittle

jreleaser/jreleaser#185

https://jreleaser.org/guide/latest/reference/packagers/winget.html#_distribution_support

[bitspittle]

Right, that's what I'm looking at. winget doesn't support .zip file targets according to that distribution support list, so I assume at this point I still need to try running jpackage to create an .exe for now.

[aalmiray]

Zip support in Winget was added in 1.4 but the team has decided to wait until a critical mass of users has migrated to 1.4. See jreleaser/jreleaser#185 (comment)

Once that happens we'll support releasing zips with Winget.

re: auto-completion. app is a free name which you can choose to be anythign you want. It identifies a named element inside a NamedContainer, thus you must use regular KotlinDSL such as

jreleaser {
  assemble {
    jpackage {
      create("kobweb-installer") {
        ...
      }
    }
  }
}

[bitspittle]

Ah perfect, it was a Kotlin script thing. Thanks for the quick reply!