On 05/18/18 09:31, Joerg Sonnenberger wrote:
On Fri, May 18, 2018 at 09:23:23AM -0500, Jason Bacon wrote:Note, however that the WSL has some limitations:From my experience, it creates significantly less pain than Cygwin, performs a lot better and doesn't need the majority of the source hacks that mingw(64) does. Joerg
Since we're on the subject, I gathered some fresh data on WSL running on a bare-metal Windows machine, Core i7 2.8 Ghz, 4 GiB RAM, Debian WSL app.
The bad news:1. My first attempt to install the Debian WSL app just hung at "This may take a few minutes...". I had to remove the Debian app, reboot, and reinstall it in order to get a working Linux env.
2. Performance is intolerable in some respects. It shows the same bottlenecks I'm used to seeing in Cygwin. Unpacking the pkgsrc dist took an order of magnitude longer than it would on a real BSD or Linux system on this hardware. GNU configure scripts in the pkgsrc bootstrap perform about 1 check / second, similar to what I've seen under Cygwin. I get far better performance out of a VM guest running BSD or Linux under VirtualBox.
3. "apt-cache search ." showed 163 available packages on the pristine install. After a little head-scratching I decided to try running "apt-get update". This fixed the problem and I'm now seeing over 50,000 packages available. ( Don't freak: Debian packages isn't really that far ahead of pkgsrc, as the Debian community likes to break everything into the smallest possible pieces; separate packages for header files and docs, GCC is split into gcc, g++, gfortran, *-libs, etc. )
The good news:1. After fixing the apt issue, installation of openssh-client and the GCC packages via apt-get went smoothly.
2. auto-pkgsrc-setup (http://netbsd.org/~bacon/) worked (although very slowly) as it would on a real Debian system (i.e. no problems except for having to set SH to something other than dash to avoid the bootstrap complaint about incompatible echo command).
I haven't tried any additional pkgsrc builds, and I don't plan to as it would take a week to install anything substantial at this rate.
Depending on your needs, access to the Debian package collection and close compatibility with a real Linux system could be big advantages over Cygwin.
Cygwin is still the easiest way, IMHO, to install some basic Unix tools for connectivity (including remote X11 graphics) with Unix systems.