Boxstarter builds on top of Chocolatey providing reboot resiliency, commands for configuring and personalizing your windows environment, running windows updates and the ability to install packages on remote machines as well as installing from scripts stored in any http resource like a gist. This makes Boxstarter ideal for setting up new developer machines with Chocolatey!
Today Boxstarter ships its own version of Chocolatey - the last powershell based version 0.9.8.33. This version of Chocolatey can be installed on the same machine as the current Chocolatey version and is only used by Chocolatey. Howerver, this has caused some confusion, and as Chocolatey evolves, some packages will become incompatible with this older version of Chocolatey.
I am getting very close to releasing a new version of Boxstarter that will no longer need the older Chocolatey and will instead ship with a Chocolatey API library leveraging the functionality of today's chocolatey.
Why is this taking a long time? Just as the newer version of Chocolatey involved a complete rewrite. This effort to make Boxstarter compatible has been no small feat. Key challenges have been dealing with injecting Boxstarter state into a separate powershell process and nested processes, activating a .net v4 assembly inside a .Net v2 powershell process (if on win 7 or 2008R2) and managing this from remote machine calls.
Furthermore, I am updating to the latest version of Pester, a unit testing framework for powershell which have required me to submit some PRs into Pester to address breakages related to its mocking abilities.
So be on the lookout very soon for the availablility of a Boxstarter 2.6 prerelease. I'm hoping to get others to test this new version and provide feedback so I can release a stable version shortly afterwards.