Paket: Package manager for .NET and Mono

I hate to be a Negative Nancy, but wouldn't it be easier to Just Fix NuGet? I don't think that any of the problems being solved here are fundamentally incompatible with being fixed in NuGet (though I could be wrong).

<p><pre><code> How to get Paket Paket is available on NuGet. To install the tool, run the following command in the Package Manager Console: PM&gt; Install-Package Paket </code></pre> Oh no, don&#x27;t give us another Python <i>easyinstall</i> mess; you need a package manager to get another package manager to get a third package manager. Well, at least it&#x27;s not called &quot;easy install&quot; because that&#x27;s exactly what it&#x27;s not unless you already have everything installed. The whole purpose of a package manager is to avoid dependency mess and instead we get another 2 links in the chain that has to be installed manually.

My answer to the main question in the faq, &quot;Why do I need Paket instead of nuget?&quot; (my paraphrase) is this: meh. NuGet&#x27;s behavior simply doesn&#x27;t cause me that many problems, and when it&#x27;s a superbigdeal I can just get a git submodule and be on my merry way. The one killer feature I want is an easy way to convert a downloaded NuGet package into a folder of the latest sources.<p>And hey: NuGet is open-source.

The front page doesn&#x27;t answer THE question, why would I use Paket instead of NuGet. Realistically in the .NET ecosystem, once Microsoft introduces a passable product (such as NuGet) the chances of any alternative to gain adoption are veeery swim.

If you want to add a killer feature to this, add better handling for non-referenced dependencies. By non-referenced I mean they don&#x27;t exist as a project reference like a dll would. For example, if you&#x27;re doing a web project and you depend on say angular. Angular isn&#x27;t added as a project reference. Nuget&#x2F;Visual Studio do all kinds of oddities to work around this. Unless there is already a solution to this that I don&#x27;t know about (besides using two different package managers).

How does this differ from asp.vnext&#x27;s kpm?

One thing I wish NuGet would do - let me download packages directly from Github, like Bower and Grunt do. I do use Bower and Grunt with ASP.NET but usually mixed with some NuGet packages. It would be nice to have one system for all.