Not working on BASH on Windows

[Alex Brooks]

Hi,

On 7 September 2016 at 23:11, Jon Davies <jon at hedgerows.org.uk> wrote:
>
> On 6 September 2016 at 09:44, Shevek <shevek at shevek.co.uk> wrote:
> > I can confirm the same happens with other downloads
> [...]
> >
> > So it appears that AtomicParsley is the culprit.
>
> Yes, for some reason atomicparsley doesn't work ubuntu-in-windows-10 -
> it just locks up.  If you can work out why I'll happily incorporate a
> patch in the ppa build.
>
> Jon
>

There are some "known issues" with the new Windows Subsystem for Linux
that breaks a lot of stuff.

A lot of Linux Standard Base features haven't actually been
implemented (yet).  Most significantly udev simply does not exist.
Sometimes things can fail without warning unless you started bash with
administrative rights (ping for example simply doesn't work unless you
are running as a windows admin).  Most of procfs is missing, including
the whole of /proc/sys/fs, UTF-8 encoding isn't available,
timer_create hasn't been implemented, semaphores and shared memory
don't exist, everything has to be 64 bit, there is not 32 bit ELF
support, symlinks work differently to the POSIX or LSB standard,
/etc/mtab doesn't exist, extended attributes don't work, there are no
deamons or services, there is no X implementation (heck, you can't
even use 256 colours in the terminal).  There are other missing
features detailed on their GitHub project - I think they have over 500
open issues.

What exactly does atomicparsley call at the system level?  Does it use
extended attributes?  Does it perform any funky networking?

For now, remember that WSL is still very much in beta.  There is (and
has been for some time) a much more complete "Linux on Windows"
solution around; Cygwin[1,2].  Until Microsoft release move WSL out of
beta it may be best to stick with Cygwin if you want POSIX tools on
Windows.  Cygwin even has a full X implementation.

The new Ubuntu on Windows WSL looks great, but it is still at a very
early stage and simply isn't usable for most things yet.  It certainly
doesn't match the feature set of Cygwin.

HTH,

Alex

[1] https://www.redhat.com/services/custom/cygwin/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cygwin