I've Nim 0.15.2 announcement I've read that:
For Windows we now provide zipfiles in addition to the NSIS based installer which proves to be hard to maintain and after all these months still has serious issues. So we encourage you download the .zip file instead of the .exe file!
and in the download page:
You can download an installer for both 32 bit and 64 bit versions of Windows below. Note that these installers have some known issues and so will unlikely to be provided further in the future.
I was wondering ... it's been a while that I've installed Chocolotey and use ChocoloteyGUI to update a number of software packages which don't provide a self-updater — included some languages, like Ruby, Node.js, Go, and others.
I've found a Nim package on Chocolatey, but it hasn't been updated in a while, and it's still at Nim v.0.11.2:
https://chocolatey.org/packages/nim
But I think that the idea of maintaining an official Nim-Chocolatey package could be a good idea for Window versions of Nim.
The only issues at hand here would be:
As for point (1), I think what we need is that there should be either an "official" package (maintained by Nim devs) or at least a package which has the official blessing of Nim devs.
Point (2) is a bit more tricky though. I think that a Nim package should only install Nim, its docs, ecc. Aporia and MinGW should be taken care by the users. For example, I don't install MinGW, I use TDM-GCC (might be a bit old, but seems better configured).
Chocolatey does a good job at telling users there's a new version of the package, installing it silently and taking care of all the boring stuff.
What's the general view on this? And, does anyone know who created the Nim package linked above? The only info I've found is that it was maintained by a user called "pine613", but his GitHub account has been discontinued.
Anyhow, the counter on Nim-Chocolatey package says it was downloaded 117 time for Nim 0.10.2, and 106 times for Nim 0.11.2 -- a total of over 200 downloads, which is rather promising if you think it was a short-lived and unmaintained package.
I think that it would have to be some kind of "official" package, maintained by the same group that maintain Nim releases — that is to guarantee that it doesn't get abandoned. I also have the impression that this would speed up the process of having Choco-packages updates approved sooner by the admins.
Possibly, maintaining the Choco package could be automated with some scripts — some strings changes, like version and download links. For Nim maintainers it should be possible to integrate it in the Nim release chain, having the new Choco package updated and pushed on a GitHub repo, and so on.
I maintain the Nim package for scoop, which is another package manager for Windows.
Unlike Chocolatey, it installs software into homedir therefore does not require admin privileges. Its interface is similar to Homebrew's.
I tried both Chocolatey and Scoop and found Scoop much better. Of course, this is just my opinion, so you should try it yourself.
With the same argument, it would also be necessary for Nim to have an official package for debian, Fedora, Arch, Nix, Homebrew…
I think maintaining packages is in better hands with those people who use the package managers.