Make beta version available on the windows package manager
Please make the beta version of Blender available for the windows package manager like WinGet, Scoop and Chocolatey
There should be a considerable amount of people that uses terminal for everything by now, even for windows user, not to mention the terminal bros and the big fanbase, and also since terminal is a very straightforward interface to get to the url.
Note: I'm not linux user, I don't know how things are managed over there
Hail Powershell Hail Bill Gates
, (I no longer have the same perception of the person that I used to look up to, when I was younger.)
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The Blender developers don't update these specific software managers. We only do blender.org , windows store, snap and steam. Snap and steam have nightly builds (Beta and Alpha). Windows Store is complicated to add, so we don't do it.
Main reason is that these software managers have their own requirements of how software needs to be packaged. It might be better to get to the package maintainer and ask them to add a beta/alpha channel. They know better what is expected.
AFAICT from my little reasearch:
Winget is built into Windows and works by submitting a YAML manifest to Microsoft’s GitHub repo that points to your installer, while Chocolatey packages wrap your installer or zip with instructions on how to run it.
In both cases the package has to be updated for each new release, but it can take use the zip files thar the BF already produces, and AFAICT the packaging can be automated so there would be no extra manual work once it’s set up.
Although I am the kind of user that loves using the terminal to install stuff whenever i can, I don't do that for Blender (I prefer using Blender Launcher which makes handling multiple versions easier).
And I don't think we could say that there is (or will be anytime soon) a significant Windows userbase that would actively install Blender via CLI, and even less so for daily builds.
Just to give some numbers, on Blender by the Numbers – 2020 — Blender Blog we can read:
Meanwhile on Blender's Chocolatey Package page , we can read:
Although 16k seems a lot for a single release and it's still ongoing, it's only 0.45% of 3.5M.
And even looking at the downloads history for all of 2020 :
Total: 102 264 downloads, so 0.73% of 14M downloads in 2020. Just for comparison, the Microsoft store package had 364k downloads, aka 2.60% of 14M downloads.
And let's bear in mind that neither chocolatey's or Microsoft Store's packages were counted in the "14M downloads from blender.org ", so the percentages out of total downloads on every sources combined would be lower.
And on top of that, though we don't have official numbers, the amount of people who would download daily builds would be drasticaly lower.
You're the first one I've met.
i use the terminal, windows and linux. it's not hard. a package manager for blender would be nice