microsoft / microsoft/winget-cli

Provide metadata for installed packages

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#3,702 1 comment 2 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Area-Matching Command-List Issue-Feature
Dominant language
C++
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Description

Description of the new feature / enhancement

Sometimes WinGet doesn't correctly match an installed package with one in a configured source.

It can be tricky to see exactly what might be causing the failure. I'd like to be able to get the metadata written to the registry by installers subsequently used by WinGet for correlation.

This is also something that could be useful to capture in some kind of a flow where the Windows Sandbox can be used to install packages and then improve the manifest during a more interactive wingetcreate execution run. It might also help developers verify the behavior of their installer. We've seen examples where an install works correctly, but during an upgrade flow, the metadata doesn't get updated.

Maybe something like:
winget list <package> --include-correlation # Naming things is hard

I don't know about potential truncation issues, or how to reason about rendering the data when there are multiple results in the CLI just yet, but I wanted to capture this before I forgot.

Inspired by troubleshooting with @Smith8154 and @Trenly in:
https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli/issues/3674#issuecomment-1736142608

Proposed technical implementation details

No response

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Research direction

Start with the proposed winget list <package> --include-correlation entry point and investigate how installer metadata is written to the registry and later used for package correlation. Define how truncation and multiple results should be rendered, and consider the Windows Sandbox and wingetcreate scenarios; done means users can retrieve the relevant metadata reliably during troubleshooting.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Domain
cli, operating-systems
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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