Proposal: Add Capstone to the Windows Package Manager (winget)

[stevenjoezhang]

Feature

• New architecture module
• Support for processor extension
• Add more instruction details (elaborated below)
• Binding support for: language
• Other (elaborated below)

Describe the feature you'd like

I'm currently working on an Intel PT decoder on Windows that relies on Capstone, and I noticed that the build process for Capstone has become very easy on Windows with VS 2022, clang-cl and cmake toolchain.

To improve accessibility for more Windows developers, I’d like to propose adding Capstone to the Windows Package Manager (winget). This would make it possible to install Capstone with a simple command like winget install Capstone, just like on *nix with apt or brew.

I’d like to know that are you open to having Capstone distributed via winget? Would you be willing to host Windows binaries as part of GitHub Releases? And I'd be happy to help with setting up GitHub Actions to automatically build Windows binaries (if needed).

Thanks for the amazing work on Capstone!

[Rot127]

This was discussed before a few times and definitely something on the list.

For packaging we use CPack (see here). Building an installer should be pretty straight forward and adding it to the release as well.

But we lag maintainers currently and don't have the capacity to keep packages in package managers up to date. So if you want to contribute you are very much welcome.

Related: #2153 and #2416 (32bit Windows crashes currently)

[stevenjoezhang]

I looked into options for automating the publishing process to WinGet. Currently, there are two relatively convenient methods:

1. Using the winget-releaser GitHub Actions:
   This can automatically submit updates whenever a new version is released. However, it has two prerequisites:

   • You need to create a classic Personal Access Token (PAT) with the public_repo scope.
   • You need to fork the microsoft/winget-pkgs repository under the same account or organization.

2. Using Dumplings:
   This is a third-party bot that automatically checks specific repositories for updates and submits them to WinGet.
   Its advantage is that it doesn't require setting up a token or forking the microsoft/winget-pkgs repository, making the process simpler.
   The downside is that it's a third-party service, so we have no direct control over it. If something goes wrong, we would need to contact the original author to resolve it.

@Rot127 Which publishing method do you prefer? After the release of version 6.0.0-Alpha4, I can help submit it to WinGet and test the automated update submission process.

[Rot127]

Option 1 seems more stable in the long run IMHO.
Also, in case of trouble, it seems easier to resolve. Which kinda crucial because we have shortage of maintainers currently.
Due to this it will take a while until we can set it up.

@kabeor Any opinion?
Also cc @AndrewQuijano, because it is kinda related to your idea to publish packages in the Linux repositories.
Maybe you can get some inspiration if you still want to do it?