NI Package Management Idea Exchange

Hello

In addition to the idea mentioned in the following post, 

https://forums.ni.com/t5/Additional-NI-Software-Idea/NIPM-queued-amp-scheduled-download-amp-install/idc-p/3963380#M541

would like to propose that the NI offline package to be installed entirely in offline mode, rather than trying to connect and fail, whenever a connection seemed present. 

and on top of that, offline installers to be able to be integrated into a local repository in our own network, and packaged distributions can be directed to them, as not all operation PCs are given access to the internet. For the time being, let the browsers handle auto-resuming downloads. 

The NIPKG format allows dependencies to be listed by package name, and of particular interest, groups of packages to satisfy a dependency - that is, a dependency can be satisfied by any one of a collection of packages (see the "|" character at http://www.ni.com/documentation/en/ni-package-manager/latest/manual/control-file-attributes/).

Meanwhile, many packages are available in more than one format - e.g. NIPKG, VIPackage, GPM package.

However, if I install package A with VIPM, and package B depends on it, but I try to use NIPM, I'll see I have a "missing" dependency.

Worse, if I now install 'package A' with NIPM, (assuming the packages are equivalent) both systems will believe I have the package installed, but uninstalling from either won't affect the other (leading to broken code).

Could NIPM gain the ability to allow specifying dependencies on non-nipkg packages?

This could be either via specific other package managers that could be checked (VIPM, GPM?) or perhaps via some "pre-install dependency scanner" VI.

In the former case, perhaps I could list "PackageA|VIPM::PackageA" as the dependency.

In the latter case, I as the developer of B could write a VI which checks some details (e.g. existence of specific VIs on disk, or call into VIPM/GPM, etc), and then output a boolean indicating if I (the package B developer) believed my dependency on "PackageA|VIPM::PackageA" (by package name) was satisfied. (In this case, I'd probably just give the dependency as "PackageA" though...)

I think this would be useful especially when sharing code more widely.

I don't expect that this idea would cover searching for packages in other managers' repositories though - if it fails whatever "is currently installed?" test, and can't be sourced from NIPKG feeds, then the install should give the current dialog (missing PackageA).

If a package fails to install, there is never anything helpful presented to try to diagnose the problem. 

This is hot garbage.

I end up having to run nipkg.exe from command line to get some modicum of feedback, but even then it's usually still insufficient.

My latest use case is that I have created a pre-install.bat file (configured to run as a pre-install custom execute, per my package build spec), and that bat file is intended to throw an error (set nonzero return code and route message to stderr) if some required dependencies do not exist. I went to the trouble of doing these sanity checks and building meaningful errors, but they don't actually get exposed when I run the installer, so I'm left guessing as to what went wrong.