microsoft / microsoft/winget-cli

Increase the number of allowed tags from 16 to many more in Manifest 1.12

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@JohnMcPMS is already working on this.

Since Dec 20, 2025.

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Description

Relevant area(s)

WinGet CLI

Description of the new feature / enhancement

When validating a package with winget validate --manifest (...), the max number of tags that (...).locale.(language code).yaml allows without throwing an error is 16.

For a handful of the most popular and multi-purposed packages in winget-pkgs, 16 is sometimes not enough. Off the top of my head, Epic Games Launcher and AOMEI Partition Assistant, are the clearest cases.

For instance, to take Epic Games Launcher, 1.3.155.0 has filled up its 16 tags previously, which are:

- distribute
- epic
- epic-games-launcher
- epic-games-store
- epic-online-services
- fortnite
- game
- game-store
- games
- games-store
- gaming
- launcher
- marketplace
- store
- unreal
- unreal-engine

I myself would probably have removed at least 5 of those existing tags, but only on the assumption that people simply use e.g. winget search game instead of searching for whole tag names; but that's not the point for this particular issue report.

Besides those 16 listed above, a fair few tags would be well warranted and would've warranted expanding the amount of tags:

- egs (Very, very common abbreviation)
- unrealengine (Non-dashed version of tag)
- epicgamesstore (Non-dashed version of tag)
- epiconlineservices (Non-dashed version of tag)
- xp99vr1bpsbqj2 (The ID of the program on Microsoft Store)

A somewhat similar situation is AOMEI Partition Assistant, where 10.9.0 has so many programs-within-a-program that I needed to use spacing (- ext2 ext3 ext4) to work around the tag limit, and even then there's at least 10 more tags that it would warrant (- discrecovery, etc.).

Proposed technical implementation details

In the upcoming specifications for Manifest 1.12, increase the number of allowed tags from 16 to, let's say, 50.

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