microsoft windows platform support

[Anders F Björklund]

Being a portable program, smart should support running on Microsoft Windows too...
It would still need a package manager in order to be useful, but that's another story.

There was some work done on this for Google Summer of Code 2009 (in WinLibre),
including fixes to make the unix-centric smart code work on an nt platform as well.

[mitzampt (mitzampt)]

There are two issues with a package manager for Windows, even for cygwin:
1. PE executables cannot be overwritten while running, so unless the packages themselves or a subsystem of smart manages to solve that the most probable course of action is applying updates on reboot. This shouldn't be necessary for new packages, just for updates.
2. Dependencies tracking in windows for windows runtimes would be a little tricky, not to mention tracking windows versions themselves. This could be attacked with metapackages. Also, in the case of cygwin tracking cygwin's version is easy, updating cygwin would be a challenge.
With that said, I hope you guys manage to port smart to windows platform.

[Anders F Björklund (afb)]

Updating running applications/libraries has similar issues on other platforms too (even if it's usually about the changes not taking affect than about the filesystem locking the files), so isn't necessary a show-stopper in itself.

Smart itself runs fine / is ported to the Windows platform, it just needs someone to do the package manager and packages. This includes getting dependency closure right, whether it's system or package dependencies.