Five second tutorial

• Install it!
• Add some sources

Introduction

Vaca is kind of a poor man's clone of apt-get for Windows.

It aims to make installing and, more importantly, keeping your programs up to date without you having to keep going to web sites of countless projects and manually update every little utility that you use.

Vaca uses RSS to list releases of software packages so you should be able to subscribe to a program's blog or news page and get updates automatically.

I maintain a list of the software i install with Vaca here

!Vaca does not in any way want to be an installation system like Inno Setup, it will only download files and call them if necessary.

This is not meant as an "your updater sucks!" project for Firefox and other projects which ship their own installer. It is simply a result of my frustration with the poor state of windows installers when coming from Linux.

I just can't believe that something like Vaca has not been done yet, a simple to tool to keep all your packages up to date without getting in your way and forcing developers to write the same freaking update code over, and over, and over, and over.

It is also an attempt to bring consistency to the process of updating your windows applications, why should you have to learn a new interface for each programs update function - on Linux you click two buttons and ALL the packages on your system are up to date.

Vaca Sources

So far i am the only one serving up Vaca update lists (which are actually just RSS feeds) but i hope that others will pick up on this and start to add vaca tags in their RSS feeds.

I would really like it if projects started putting vaca tags in their regular news/blog/feed thingy, that would mean that as soon as a new release is ready a new blog post is made and embedded in that blog post is the directions on how to get the release installed.

Please write me if you have started using Vaca for your project.

Another sentiment: i am too busy (read: lazy) to maintain the Vaca sources lists on this site for all the projects out there. Although you might persuade me to add a project to the list of sources, and i do appreciate being told when a new release is ready that i should add to Vaca.

What this all boils down to is this: i do not scale! If Vaca gets underway there is all the good reasons in the world to build a nice community site where we can let "Vaca maintainers" keep just one or two projects up to date, for the benefit of all of us.