Pushing fvm to the chocolatey

[TarasMazepa]

How do you prepare and publish fvm for Chocolatey?

I'm wondering if I can help somehow. Recently, I have automated some of the steps for my own command-line tool.

One of the things I want to achieve is to have fvm shipped as a binary, so it would not have dart-sdk as a dependency (which forces users to have specific dart-sdk version installed with chocolatey)

[leoafarias]

@TarasMazepa thanks for volunteering to help. Right now FVM uses cli-pkg, to automatically deply to chocolatey. You can see it here. https://github.com/leoafarias/fvm/actions/runs/10560273622/job/29254361939 Is there any current issue with Chocolatey, or do you think it can be improved somehow?

[TarasMazepa]

Thanks for the response and the links. I have examined the current situation, and here is a run down:

1. In releases, you have already prebuilt packages for different Windows versions https://github.com/leoafarias/fvm/releases/tag/3.2.1

2. Each of them contains a batch file:

@echo off
REM This script drives the standalone fvm package, which bundles together a
REM Dart executable and a snapshot of fvm.

set SCRIPTPATH=%~dp0
set arguments=%*
"%SCRIPTPATH%\src\dart.exe" "%SCRIPTPATH%\src\fvm.snapshot" %arguments%

3. There is also a portable dart executable and a snapshot of fvm
   
4. If you download fvm.3.2.1.nupkg from chocolatey and unpack it, you will see it contains complete source code as well as fvm.nuspec, chocolateyInstall.ps1 and chocolateyUninstall.ps1
5. In fvm.nuspec, you would notice dart-sdk dependency:

    <dependencies>
      <dependency id="dart-sdk" version="[3.4.1]" />
    </dependencies>

6. In chocolateyInstall.ps1 you would see that fvm is being compiled from source code:

$ToolsDir = (Split-Path -parent $MyInvocation.MyCommand.Definition)
Write-Host "Fetching Dart dependencies..."
$SourceDir = "$ToolsDir\source"
Push-Location -Path $SourceDir
dart pub get --no-precompile | Out-Null
Pop-Location

New-Item -Path $PackageFolder -Name "bin" -ItemType "directory" | Out-Null
Write-Host "Building executable..."
$ExePath = "$PackageFolder\bin\fvm.exe"
dart compile exe '"-Dversion=3.2.1"' '"-Ddart-version=3.4.1"' "$SourceDir\bin\main.dart" -o $ExePath
Generate-BinFile "fvm" $ExePath

Due to that fvm will always decide which dart-sdk user needs to have installed on their machine.

I think this could be improved by removing dependency and shipping prebuild snapshots already generated and attached to the releases. Let me know what do you think.

[leoafarias]

We currently use cli_pkg to handle this. Could this be an improvement on that package, or could you suggest a configuration change?

[TarasMazepa]

That would be a lot more work. Alternatively I can create separate chocolatey package, for instance fvmbin, or bfvm which would be deployed with binaries.

[TarasMazepa]

@leoafarias, do you have an opinion about what I have described?

[leoafarias]

@TarasMazepa, so we would just have a separate .ps1 file? cli_pkg currently handles the submission to Chocolatey. I will also check the changelogs to see if this is something they fixed on their end. Also, it seems there are some Choco issues, which I am not sure if you had experience with, but since you are knowledgeable, I would appreciate your help so we can have a better Chocolatey experience.