MDG folks removed it because it didn’t work perfectly. Well it works better for me !
Why, for local development sake, would I need to install chocolatey only to get Meteor ? Do I need chocolatey to install node? to install git? NO
Chocolatey is not a windows standard way to install a program.
It comes with a lot of overhead (especially because it can mess up the PATH env variable and require to use the command line tool on windows).
If your path is too long with path of chocolatey + meteor + existing path, you’re onboard for a lot of troubles.
I would advise that it is wiser to provide the installer back on Meteor website. We need a direct link.
Please people join me if you believe it should be as easy as to install a program to get started on Meteor for Windows users.
As long as chocolatey works at all I’d rather the development team concentrate on improving Meteor itself. And when you say chocolatey is heavy on memory usage, do you just mean when Meteor is downloading and installing? Or does it register a daemon/service that runs and takes up a lot of memory?
If you’re trying to solicit help you’re not going about it in a very good way. You didn’t even answer my questions about the increase in memory usage you’re experiencing.
The old installer did not work perfectly. That’s exactly why it was replaced with a chocolatey script.
I can’t find the issue/pull request where it was discussed but the installer was a black box which frequently had errors and had no method of alerting users that there was an issue, it would just sit pending for hours
Sorry for having been offensive / pissed off by your comment yesterday.
Well this is not a lot of work: the installer already exists. I just published it on google drive. How much does it cost to upload it on the official Meteor website? Even if it is not maintained it still works so it should be there as an alternative (even if I repeat myself: I believe this should be the first way for a local dev windows user.
Can community maintain the installer ? I hope so.
I speak about around 100Mo of disk space for choco alone.
The only people constrained to install chocolatey are the new comers who will never know about the installer, not the top devs like you (by the way, do you even run on Windows? because if you’re on a Mac or Linux why do you care so much?)
As Windows user (so much so that I recently asked if anyone here is doing Meteor development using Edge as their first browser to test with). I’m tempted to agree with your point - yet, I don’t.
Chocolatey is a great package manager, something I assume every technically minded windows user embraces. Even on the most constrained devices, 100Mb disk space are not a real issue.
What I do believe though is a disjoint between documentation and users targeted. The Meteor documentation pretty much just says ‘install chocolatey’ and the chocolatey documentation assumes users know some basic tasks such as running a console as an administrator without instructions how to do so.
Meteor is a great framework for beginners and when making it a requirement to use choco, a full installation manual - which would only take some 20 or so paragraphs would be helpful for beginners, who had no chocolatey exposure.
The problem with providing an official installer is that the official installer was buggy and generated endless issue reports that were hard or impossible to debug.
At least chocolatey gives you some logs so you can start attempting to debug it
I thought the new installation method was hard (initially) but I find meteor works better now. Although, the windows installer had very little issues for me. Overall the new method of installation works well and I can just copy my app to fedora with very little re-configurations.
Spending one night to make Chocolatey working… While the installation only requires/required 1 or 2 commands in a console, and eventually a reboot of the computer…
And I’m grateful that I don’t have to use a *nix-System. So there.
I mean, I once delved into the madness that is the installation of Mapnik on a Debian system. Arcane commands upon arcane commands, downloading Cthulu-like XML configuration files which contain SQL-commands!
I’m glad I was able to use the default configuration because when I glimpsed into those files, the abyss stared back…
Mee too I am struggling in win installing, as I documented in another recent topic. Not shure I’ll get it right. so I am working on giving up on win install. I think it is just a bunch of trouble and time consuming. So, I will explore installing a Docker virtual machine on my windows.
The reason of using my win machine is because it already has 3 screens that I would need to multiplex with another machine that does not have extra video cards.if I would use another machine that is Linux.
I need to investigate what is needed (command line instructions) for installing it and for when I install NPM or Git clones.
I will then be able to open many code files at once for better logic follow up while experimenting.
Any help welcome on how to do basic maintenance operations on dockers for:
The only reason I was trying to dev Meteor on a win machine was the multiscreen. I got a jungle forest of problems with my last attempts to install Meteor on Windows. Now my solution is: a Linux CPU on a used Dell Optiplex 7010 that has 3 video connectors onboard: vga+DP+DP, so, I suppose only one video driver or 3 same drivers from Linux POV.
I agree with @antoninadert , and not because I have no exposure to packet mgrs or to cmd line tools. If I had a choice, I would prefer working with a good old Debian or even Ubuntu with a Gnome desktop so I can do whatever suits me best.
The fact is: in a corporate environment, you don’t always have a choice regarding the OS to use. So in most organizations Windows is the OS to be. In addition you have to deal with several layers of security related procedures and approval each time you want to install something that is not a standard in your organization.
In the case of Meteor, devs who are working in such orgs on Windows will struggle with the bureaucracy and with security rules: rather than requesting approvals for installing a single app (via Win installer), they would have to request approvals for the necessary rights to install Chocolatey, to run choco commands with elevated privileges, to install Meteor, and if necessary to apply config changes at system layer… That makes a LOT of requests!
Unfortunately, the people who take decisions do not necessary know these tools and in most cases the requests will simply be rejected with a legit reason: installing a packet mgr on windows will allow users to install other apps than Meteor.
In my case I had to simply give up on using Meteor in my org despite the facts that I really believe Meteor would have been a perfect solution for a project I worked on.
Having said that, I am convinced of the potential of a packet mgr for windows such as Chocolatey, but to get back to the subject of this post: I really believe a windows installer would be more than welcomed by users of this OS in corporations with strict security policy, especially that an msi/exe installer is the standard way to install third party apps on windows.
To dismiss chocolatey as a non-standard for Windows is to ignore Microsoft’s own guidelines on using it for Windows deployments in Azure. So, while chocolatey may not be a standard in the desktop/workstation world (at the moment), it definitely is in the cloud.
Having said that, I agree that it’s a hard sell in most corporates, but even so, I’m not convinced by the “good old Windows installer” route. Microsoft is moving more and more into automation, and MSI’s are just not a good fit.
For Windows generally, you could look at Linux VMs in VirtualBox, which I still use from time-to-time. With Windows 10, you have the option of native Linux in various flavours, which I also use. You’ve still got to “sell” those into your Company, but that may be an easier sell than something leveraging PowerShell and Windows directly.
Finally, don’t dismiss AWS and Azure. They both offer generous free-tier usage, which for Meteor development is more than sufficient, especially as you can shut down resources when you don’t need them. If you need a platform to demo your ideas to your Company, that can be a good way to go. Knock their socks off and they may then be happy to give you the tools you need
