Debian package on Windows

[James Cowgill]

Hi,

On Sat, 2016-02-20 at 01:09 +0000, Eric Mittelette wrote:
> I contact you today about a crazy idea, but I hope it is a right kind
> of crazy!
> 
> I'm PM in the Visual C++ Team (VC Lib to be precise here at
> Microsoft), we started to think about lib acquisition (still a
> painful process for C++ on Windows) and we are imaging different
> options, one is to port apt-get on Windows.
> Porting Apt-Get mean using Debian format (we love it) and providing
> Windows binary inside the package...

Firstly, the Debian Games Team is probably the wrong list for this. Try
posting to debian-devel at lists.debian.org if you want more people to see
it.

This is an interesting idea. How do you envision this working? Is the
plan to have applications packaged in debs and depend on a suitable C++
library package? Doesn't this mean the application has to ship this
package manager as well?

Installing Debian packages is split into (roughly) two programs: APT
handles downloading packages and calculating dependencies between them,
but dpkg is the program which actually installs them. I imagine porting
dpkg to Windows will be a lot of work due to its reliance on unix APIs.
APT might be a bit easier, but I don't know the code that well.

Another option instead of porting APT is to use similar formats (eg for
debs, apt repositories) and build a separate program to work with them.
I quick google search brings up this which is based on dpkg (but shares
no code) and works on Windows: http://windowspackager.org/

> For doing that we imagine a light way process to adapt your actual
> build script to generate Windows binaries using our latest Clang/c2
> compiler integration (meaning in theory just changing an env variable
> to switch from gcc or Clang to our Clang/C2 compiler will be
> enough...)

The compiler probably won't make much difference here. The problem is
the unix APIs that APT / dpkg rely on will have to be ported to Windows
equivalents.

> The main idea here is to not reinvent the wheel for packaging
> management and use something existing, powerful and well known by the
> community.
> Of course all the project will be open source (the new Microsoft :))

Good :)

> I know you're really busy, and don't want to boring you, but I wanted
> to know your feedback about this idea?
> Do you want to be included in future discussions and provide feedback
> as we get more details fleshed out?
> 
> Again it is just a draft idea, nothing concrete, but wanted to
> validate with you and the Debian maintainers community if that make
> sense for you...
> 
> Thanks for your time
> 
> Eric Mittelette
> Senior Program Manager - Visual C++ (VCLib)
> ericmitt at microsoft.com<mailto:ericmitt at microsoft.com>

James
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