New background on NuPack - A little about how it came about…

The Fervent Coder  - The Evolution of Package Management for .NET

“When you start a journey, you are never fully sure where it is going to end up. We started the journey down package management for .NET three times with Nu[bulbar] (we in this context means the nu team, not me in particular, I was only involved in the last reboot) before we decided to try an existing infrastructure with Ruby Gems.  I have always said that I would use the best tool out there, even if it is not one that I’ve been involved in building.

Personally I’ve always felt that competition is important to drive out the best features and make all products involved better. The community benefits with competition. If you’ve spent any time with me or listened to me on twitter, you can see that I support the idea of Noodle (Bundler/gems for .NET), Horn and Open Wrap. Each of them solves a similar problem in a different way. Each of them has great things about them. Having choices is good. Not everyone likes things the same way.  I like my eggs over easy. I’m not going to force the way I like my eggs when I cook for you, but I’m going to cook them that way for me.

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No one had any idea that Nu was going to be so explosively popular when it came out two months ago. After all, we started it as an experiment to see if we could even do it. Years ago, Microsoft would have ignored what was happening in the community and just introduced what they were working on without seeming to try to really understand the needs of the community. They have been criticized again and again for appearing to follow a “not invented here” model. When they saw how successful our last reboot of Nebular was, they pulled us in to show us what they had been working on for four months prior to our last reboot and started asking for input on how they could ensure it meets the needs of the community.

But then Microsoft did something different. They made the project OSS and pulled in a few open source developers (including the Nu team) to both give feedback and contribute to the same codebase the full time MS employees are working with.

Make no mistake on the name. Microsoft renamed their tool from the codename Unpack to Unpacks to signify a merging of the community and what they were working on. …

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I thought this was a great backstory related to today’s Unpacks release…

 

Related Past Post XRef:
I “Nu” I needed you… Unpacks v1 Developer Preview/CTP 1 Released (Think, “Where have you been all my dev. life… finally an package management system/installer for .Net”)