From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 65554 invoked by alias); 10 Aug 2016 09:57:30 -0000 Mailing-List: contact cygwin-talk-help@cygwin.com; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Id: List-Subscribe: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: cygwin-talk-owner@cygwin.com Reply-To: The Vulgar and Unprofessional Cygwin-Talk List Mail-Followup-To: cygwin-talk@cygwin.com Received: (qmail 65541 invoked by uid 89); 10 Aug 2016 09:57:29 -0000 Authentication-Results: sourceware.org; auth=none X-Virus-Found: No X-Spam-SWARE-Status: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?No, score=0.9 required=5.0 tests=AWL,BAYES_50,KAM_LAZY_DOMAIN_SECURITY,RP_MATCHES_RCVD autolearn=no version=3.3.2 spammy=resource, wasn=e2, Resource, they=e2?= X-HELO: etr-usa.com Received: from etr-usa.com (HELO etr-usa.com) (130.94.180.135) by sourceware.org (qpsmtpd/0.93/v0.84-503-g423c35a) with ESMTP; Wed, 10 Aug 2016 09:57:27 +0000 Received: (qmail 97944 invoked by uid 13447); 10 Aug 2016 09:57:26 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO polypore.west.etr-usa.com) ([73.26.17.49]) (envelope-sender ) by 130.94.180.135 (qmail-ldap-1.03) with AES256-SHA encrypted SMTP for ; 10 Aug 2016 09:57:26 -0000 From: Warren Young Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Subject: First experiences with WSL (a.k.a. Bash on Windows) Message-Id: <0A6BAC78-954B-4543-BD85-50CCFB22F4A4@etr-usa.com> Date: Wed, 10 Aug 2016 09:57:00 -0000 To: The Vulgar and Unprofessional Cygwin-Talk List Mime-Version: 1.0 (Mac OS X Mail 9.3 \(3124\)) X-IsSubscribed: yes X-SW-Source: 2016-q3/txt/msg00000.txt.bz2 I=E2=80=99d been putting off playing with WSL until it got closer to releas= e. I decided that with the release of Windows 10 Anniversary Edition, that= day had come. I=E2=80=99ve only been using it for a few hours, and have already found a b= unch of broken things: - Nothing involving raw sockets works. That means no ping, no host(1), no = ifconfig=E2=80=A6 For some reason, DNS does work; apparently host is doing= it differently than glibc=E2=80=99s resolver. - /etc/hosts is ignored. - screen(1) is still broken. (I say =E2=80=9Cstill=E2=80=9D because that w= as one of the early complaints about WSL; like, day-of-announcement early.)= For some reason tmux does work. Apparently ptys aren=E2=80=99t completel= y broken now. That means sshd might also work, but I really don=E2=80=99t = want to try it at the moment. - The terminal emulation seems a bit screwy. I=E2=80=99ve gotten it to ren= der things clearly incorrectly. apt(1) seems especially good at doing this= , probably because of the way it puts its progress bar at the bottom line o= f the screen, then removes it on exit without completely redrawing the scre= en as, say, vi does, which doesn=E2=80=99t seem to have this problem. Be p= repared to hit Ctrl-L frequently. - =E2=80=9CInstalling=E2=80=9D it is about as easy as installing OpenBSD: a= ll text, a fair bit of fiddling around required, and in the end important t= hings don=E2=80=99t work because you haven=E2=80=99t manually configured th= em yet. A good example is that you don=E2=80=99t get a Desktop or Start menu icon, = and unless you know to add --login to the Bash shortcut you create manually= , you won=E2=80=99t get a login shell, and even if you do that, you don=E2= =80=99t start out in your HOME directory, apparently due to a weakness in /= etc/profile and such. - They=E2=80=99re still shipping Ubuntu 14.04. I=E2=80=99d have thought th= ey=E2=80=99d worked out the problems preventing them from moving to 16.04 b= y now. (I completely understand why they=E2=80=99d want to stick to LTS re= leases only, and I support it.) - As expected, you can=E2=80=99t run native Windows PE executables from ins= ide WSL. - It was billed as near-native speed, but a configure script I timed took a= bout 6x as long on the same hardware, and a large C++ project build took al= most 3x as long as under Linux. (i.e. Both tests on a VM running on the sa= me host.) While monitoring Resource Monitor, I see that I=E2=80=99m not pegging all 4= cores in this box in all situations that I think I ought to be able to. I haven=E2=80=99t tried comparing this to Cygwin yet. The comparison to a = Linux VM seems more appropriate. - Java=E2=80=99s unusable. Known bug =E2=80=94 #746 on GitHub =E2=80=94 no= t yet fixed. - A bunch of CPAN modules fail to install because directory link counts don= =E2=80=99t work in a POSIXly correct fashion under WSL, and Perl=E2=80=99s = MakeMaker facility apparently cares about this. The workaround makes me qu= easy. (GitHub issue #186.) I still haven=E2=80=99t been able to get Date:= :Manip installed. - Windows Console < MinTTY. I miss copy-on-select and Shift-Insert most. Stuff that does work as hoped-for: - apt! I have yet to find something I wanted that either wasn=E2=80=99t av= ailable or didn=E2=80=99t work once installed, outside of the problems ment= ioned above. Stuff that works even though I thought it wouldn=E2=80=99t: - WSL processes show up in the Windows Task Manager. I=E2=80=99m certain I= heard that this didn=E2=80=99t work back in late March when WSL was announ= ced. Bottom line: Not yet ready for prime time.