NI Package Management Idea Exchange

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Keep valid license when updating.

I had a issue on Windows 11 where the NI-MAX configuration got corrupted. An NI Technical Support Engineer advised me to set the NI Device Loader service to 'Delayed Start' and change the 'Recovery' tab to 'Restart the service'. That solved this issue.

But the problem is that using NI Packet Manager to repair or install things, this NI Device Loader service is sometimes reset to ‘Automatic’ and then also the ‘Recovery’ tab is back to the default values. So we must check those settings every time after using the NI Packet Manager.

Idea: If a service is already there, NI Packet Manager should not change the properties of that service.

It would be nice to create an offline installer that includes the NIPM bootstrapper installer from the NIPM CLI.

The installer payload would come from any of:

A feed in the current configuration
A feed from a directory on disk
A selection of installed packages
A selection of packages in a directory on disk

There would be options for indicating:

Which package(s) would always be installed
Whether to include Depends, EULAS, Suggests, and Recommends packages (resolved from current configuration and/or the source feed)

I've recently been able to do this with a ton of scripting but it would likely be so much cleaner and reliable if NIPM managed it all.

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

image (8).png

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.

Our IT department has now opened up using NI Package Manager to install LabVIEW, and is leaving it to us to do these installs, reducing their role largely to managing licensing. This even includes installing the IDE for our coders.

I can't complain that they've opened this up, except that there are a lot of choices to make, not just in what main elements to install, but in option selections in prompts presented by the installers. it would be nice if we could have NIPM build up a script of all the elements we're installing (IDE, extras, drivers) and all the selections we make during this process. It should then save the script when the NIPM session ends, and allow appending an existing script should a script be built up over multiple NIPM sessions that might be interrupted by a restart required by one of the installs.

Ideally these scripts, when run, would either bypass the restarts normally requested after some installs until the end of the complete process, or would auto-continue after restarts that couldn't be skipped. Also important would be having it gather together all license/agreement requirements into a single prompt at the start of the script so that they can all be accepted at the start of the process rather than being prompted as each element install starts, or, better yet, have the script do a "silent" install with all licensing considered to be accepted and no prompts appearing.

Additionally, these scripts should then be editable so that if users discover they need additional drivers or libraries, different versions, or don't need some elements, they can be added to, revised, or removed from the script. It would also be great if we could make scripts that included uninstallations in the script, so scripts to upgrade from one revision to another could be built.

My vision for these scripts is a simple collection of scripts that would let us quickly get any user or test system up and running with everything needed, whether it's a new employee or an existing user or system getting a computer refresh, with minimal hand-holding of the process and no (or minimal) mistakes. My thinking is we could have a small handful of installer scripts that would fit the needs of 90%+ of our different systems that all use LabVIEW, leaving one-off systems to need only a few NIPM runs to complete their setups.

Thanks,

Erik

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In distributing software to customers (particularly through an IT group), a lot of the NIPM interaction ends up happening through batch files in an automated way. In these types of instances we're running into either:

a) we want a hard lock on the software version (software is propagated through internal feeds) or

b) the system may have intermittent/limited internet connectivity or a proxy is in use.

When installing NI products, release feeds are automagically added to the feed list... and I REALLY don't want them there.

There's a nice GUI button to disable this... but again... trying to do thing as "hands-off" for the user as possible.

Supposedly this used to be possible through editing a config file:

https://knowledge.ni.com/KnowledgeArticleDetails?id=kA00Z0000015CMrSAM&l=en-US

But as of 20.7.X this method no longer seems to work.

It would be great if this could be added to the CLI interface or contained in some sort of accessible file that can be manipulated.

This may be a "bug" rather than a feature request.

But it seems as though when NIPM encounters an error in fetching information from one feed, it aborts checking all feeds...

I can see the benefit of this (if a computer is offline, it would prevent experiencing a time-out for 50+ feeds), but in some cases it becomes VERY difficult to install new software from feeds.

For instance:

- Computer is loaded with NI software online.

- Computer is installed at customer site, or into IT network, and is removed from outside communications

- New LAN feed is registered for "custom" software

NIPM will not see any of the custom software because it errors out on the public feeds. Work arounds are:

- Download and explicitly install packages

- Unregister ALL internet feeds (a non-obvious process, particularly for the NIPM feeds), reregister local feeds, try again.

It would be nice if there was some option I could enable that says "ignore errors and proceed with feed update"... or something.

When I go to download a new piece of NI software, there is an online installer which:

1) Installs the latest version of NIPM

2) Registers any needed feeds

3) Presents an installer dialog to user

4) Installs product

5) exits gracefully.

And is <10 KB in size.

It would be incredibly useful to be able to create such an installer through on of the available builder interfaces that points to (for instance) network feeds, or a partner feed, or something like that.

There are currently some "work arounds" but they all are rather complex, clunky, and require a level of BAT file execution that's not really easy.

(I could probably do this easier through LV coding, but if the LVRuntime isn't installed, that doesn't really help me :-))

About the software install path

Hi forum, would like to propose the idea above 👆

A brief explanation of the the idea would be, if the NIPM package is opened from an ISO of a local repository (running install.exe from a mounted ISO), NIPM should install the entire package from that ISO, unless the package have a mismatch inside the ISO. this applies for offline installers, where user is responsible to check the ISO's hash once it is downloaded.

if the package installation is requested from the feed list inside of NIPM, only then it should download from NI through the internet

just an idea... to reduce possible installation errors

It would be very helpful to be able have an option to only repair the selected package. Typically the issue I have been seeing is with a single package that failed a post-install/post-install all action. Repair will go all they way back the hierarchy, which is unneeded in this case and take much longer leading to additional down time. They should be able to just repair the single package; the default being the current full hierarchy repair is fine, but there must be an option. The workaround of uninstalling and reinstalling the package is also problematic as mentioned in several other issues, since you are forced to uninstall all packages that depend on this package.

Let's say you have a really busy day and you need to test an application, but you need to install the LabVIEW or any other application like Test stand, for example, you go to your computer and use the Package Manager to install it. Then you have to go to another office, meanwhile, you let Package Manager take care of the installation that takes around 4-5 hours.

When you are back ready to run that test you found that there is an error saying that you have not stored available to install the software, and you wonder why NIPM did not check that requirement? There are literally thousands of software that have always performed that check before the installation some of then show a warning or they simply do not allow to start the installation. We really need this on NIPM.

Please help me with these guys.

When installing NI software with NIPM, it would be useful for NIPM to be able to connect to VLA server and determine avalable software to install based on the available licenses.

Example:

A user wants to install NI software and contacts the VLA administrator.
The VLA administrator assigns software rights to the user/computer and instructs the user to download and install NIPM and connect to VLA server
The user installs NIPM and is given an option to select software based on the VLA

NI Package Management Idea Exchange