From the dev team's persepective is there any interest in publishing Clojure on windows with an msi installer?

I'm interested in things that make sense to developers on windows

What would be the benefit over installing with scoop, chocolatey, etc?

I'd like an msi installer

I have neither scoop, nor chocolatey, nor any of the others installed

and what would that MSI installer install? The same powershell scripts as it does now? What would then be the benefit over the current powershell install?

also, how would an MSI installer behave in CI environments? (yes, Windows CI is a thing)

I like clicking an executable over copy&pasting some powershell commands. I'm lazy like that

doesn't mean it should be the only option 😛

given how many developers there are using windows, I am continually mystified by how hard it is to learn how windows-based devs normally do stuff or expect to install a programming language

I think there might not be one category of Windows programmers. When I'm using Windows (admittedly for dev tooling dev) I far prefer scoop over anything else

well, clearly there's not as people have suggested about 10 different things and none of them seem to have consensus

Re-downloading an .exe to update Node.js, why would I, if I can just type scoop update

(scoop is very similar to brew)

An msi installer would be familiar to the students that I work with, I think it would be a boon to the ecosystem

The only prereq for the Clojure class that I teach is a python class, and Python is installed with an installer wizard

Some of the students have complained bitterly of confusion over how to install Clojure

For my part, I'm able to help them through it but I'm no powershell guru myself

does that just move the pain to the next step? or are they good after that?

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/package-manager/winget/ An MSI installer might be nice, but more direct integration with the new native package manager in Windows 10/11 would be very useful, especially for more compliance heavy shops - the fact that there's now something officially released by Microsoft (as opposed to third party stuff like scoop or chocolatey) may make Clojure easier to try out in those settings.

ooh shiney 😁

if someone wants to figure out how to package things so they can be installed via winget, I'm happy to figure out how to make that and publish it as part of the build

If only Microsoft would use a standard Linux-y shell like everyone else, eh? 🙂

I'll read up on winget, I'm invested so I'll spend some time and see how it works

"Windows Package Manager currently supports installers in the following formats: MSIX, MSI, and EXE"

Although when you drill into the manifest description, it says "supported installer types (exe, msi, msix, inno, wix, nullsoft, appx)" but I'm not sure that's much better?

Would the Clojure core team consider blessing (or even adopting) deps.exe (from https://github.com/borkdude/deps.clj) as an alternative to the current alpha Powershell module solution? It is what I use to escape many escaping issues for Windows native testing on continuous integration servers. (I use that or bb clojure which is equivalent).