Nu – package installation made easy

I heard about Nu today on The Morning Brew which had the following 2 links:

• Aynde Rahien – small post on Nu
• Bil Simser - Creating a "New" Gem for "Nu" - From 0 to 100 in 24 Hours

Now I followed the instructions in Bil Simsers article and after some initial problems with running Ruby from the command prompt on Win 7 (not sure why but opening a command prompt at a folder rather than from the start menu resulted in being told ruby was not installed – go figure).

I followed Bil’s article down to the ‘diving in’ section and within a few moments I had installed nHibernate, nUnit, Rhino Mocks and nLog.  To say I was impressed would be a bit of an understatement, in just a few moments I’d got the latest versions of OSS software I use and all their dependencies without having to download and run several installers.

Later that day I also saw this and got very excited only to ultimately be disappointed to find out that it was only some mocked up images (although I’m sure that somebody will probably have built it by the time I post this) but firmly believe that this should be the way references should be added in the future.

I will be looking to use Nu myself from now on but wonder what does this mean for projects such as hornget, which I know Steve Strong tweeted about fairly recently, and other package managers that have been created.

I do ask myself is Nu the piece of software that changes the .Net landscape for package management by showing us who use .Net how it should be done?