Sydney from the PowerShell team opened a discussion a couple days ago asking if PowerShell 7 should ship inbox in Windows.
I thought it would be helpful to pass this discussion on. Let Microsoft know how you feel. It certainly would be an interesting change in terms of PowerShell Universal.
What’s your take Adam?
Personally, haven’t dug too far in regard to the reasons why MS has not pulled this trigger outside of knowing 7x has been in sort of flux over the past couple of years.
I wonder if they would ship in parallel to the existing 5.x version that is bundled with the OS.
It’s complicated problem. I understand the issue is that the .NET Runtime support schedule is shorter than the Windows support schedule. This means that they can’t ship .NET in Windows. Since PS is built on .NET, it suffers from this.
That said, it seems like a Microsoft problem they probably should try to solve and not a technical issue at all. Even if it was an optional feature, that would be a huge step forward. I know there was some talk of having a bootstrapper feature included. It would ship in box but then install PS from bits that it downloaded from the internet. This would even be nice.
I’d like to see it included. A lot of organizations simply don’t support it because it isn’t shipped in box.
I wonder if they could make a version of PowerShell that combines 5.x and 7.x into a single install, and you control which set of cmdlets, modules, etc. it uses/loads based on an argument, such as ps.exe -version 5 or ps.exe -version 7 and it dynamically adjusts itself accordingly, so they just ship “PowerShell” and it can do whatever the environment requires.
As far as the .NET support schedule, to me that seems almost moot since it’s not that different than installing Windows and finding 100+ updates waiting to be installed. You’d just have .NET added to that list to bring it up to date, too.
Or am I not thinking of something?