Windows and Linux co-development

[Azolo]

@notriddle

Use iex.bat --werl.

Oh right, remove-item alias:iex -Force is in my profile.

@notriddle

Do not use MSYS2.

I only use msys2 to compile things using mingw-w64. Using pacman to fetch dependencies is super nice too.

[notriddle]

MinGW is in Chocolatey.

[NobbZ]

@Azolo

Is there something in particular that you don’t like?

You can’t have VirtualBox or an Android Emulator or any other VM anymore thats not from MS when Hyper-V is activated.

[sebber]

I think you’re right. I’m not that windows proficient and what I did before was solutions I found after many hours of googling… But bash is nice and it both feel better to use than whichever terminal native to windows I tried and elixir seems simpler, just better off in it. Terminals in windows is just not up to par, and do you know that powershell aliases popular programs with it’s own functionality? curl is my only example, does not behave the same and to my knowledge you cannot override it… how could I trust it?
I guess the elixir/erlang-core developers could work around these issues though, seems to be a lot smoother when facing similar things in nodejs on Win.

Hate is of course harsh words, sorry… I just don’t like Hyper-V and it’s primarily because of my lack of knowledge about it. I’ve had issues regarding specifically docker usage and then the fact about not being able to use other virtualization software when it’s activated. I already spend too much time on things like this to learn it better… Docker was fine when it just used VirtualBox which I’ve been using for a long time on Win, Mac and Linux and I personally have multiple Dev env-setups using it

These are just my experiences, not the single truth so if you know windows better than me generally, you might not reach the same conclusions

[NobbZ]

@sebber

Docker was fine when it just used VirtualBox

As I mentioned quite a few times now (also in this Thread), docker still can use VBox on windows, just use Docker Toolbox instead of Docker for Windows.

I know, Toolbox isn’t advertised anymore, but at least they said that they want to update it until an unknown point in time.

[sebber]

@NobbZ

As I mentioned quite a few times now (also in this Thread), docker still can use VBox on windows, just use Docker Toolbox instead of Docker for Windows.

Thanks, I have totally missed your posts regarding docker!
I’ll definitly try it out, guess if I’ve even seen Toolbox around lately I might have supposed it being deprecated.

[NobbZ]

@sebber

I might have supposed it being deprecated.

It actually is But because of the known Hyper-V problems, they promised to update at least the docker running in the virtual box for quite a longer time. The toolbox itself won’t get any updates though. Which I find a bit pitty, I really love the GUI (kitematic), it makes accessing logs so easy.

I can’t find the deprecation announcement, nor the promise to update right now. The repository seems to be staled and only bumping versions of docker.

[OvermindDL1]

@Azolo

Oh… That’s easy. It’s in Enable/Disable Programs and Features.
Or, assuming you’re running on Windows 10, in an elevated (i.e. Run as Administrator) PowerShell prompt run:

Enable-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -All -FeatureName Microsoft-Hyper-V-Tools-All

It will tell you if you need to restart after that. Then it’s named Hyper-V Manager in your programs.

Not that, I mean the linux wayland session, it never displays in the hypervisor window, it is just black. Already have the Hyper-V Manager, that is how I set it all up.

@Azolo

I mean, I never liked tools like mtr or its Windows equivalent of pathping. I always felt like they gave enough information to know where there was a problem, but not why my routing wasn’t working. But the stuff I did was only a couple of hops and used hand written route rules.

It was just an example of the network communication I use. In reality I have a whole set of linux tools that I use for diagnosing, practically none of which actually work because the IP stack is missing capabilities.

@Azolo

Of course, that’s only helpful if you didn’t know that PowerShell could do those things. It isn’t helpful if you just enjoy working in bash more. Personally, I find working in PowerShell a pleasant experience.

Yeah but my tools that I’ve built up over 20 years do not work in it.

@Azolo

Haha, I remember showing an old co-worker what rvm and rbenv’s ruby-build did to make Ruby compile on a OSX. The worst was when people would shell out to which in Ruby. Perfectly good gems were deemed unusable on Windows because they called which at some point.

which works fine on Windows here, but then again I have the entire gnu toolset installed in Windows. ^.^

@Azolo

Uhh, sure. I’ll have to get back into it because it’s been awhile, but which distro were you trying to use? Also, maybe using the Hyper-V GUI will help a little bit. If I remember correctly there is a specific option you have to use to get video drivers correct.

I’ve tried a few, but for a quickstart try KDE Neon. If you can figure it out then I’d love to start showing off KDE here (these are Windows users do remember, want something familiar’ish).

@Azolo

Huh, I don’t know what to tell you. The problem we were having was people we getting 3GB blueprints and opening up 3 at a time in Adobe. Which would then spend a bunch of time writing the to the swap anytime that they went to a different program. After testing, 32 GB of RAM only increased speed marginally and increasing the swap space made it slower. Just upgrading to an SSD fixed the problem entirely.

Sadly these are Dell managed things and the desktop IT is a different department (I work in server IT here), so not a chance…

@notriddle

Set .gitattributes to not do line conversions. Set your editor to use ‘\n’ for line endings.

What editor does not auto-detect what line endings a file already uses?! o.O?

@notriddle

Native Windows apps can interact with the filesystem way faster than WSL apps, so you want to prefer ripgrep and git from Chocolatey over the same in WSL.

NTFS sucks in general.

@notriddle

Use Chocolatey.

Chocolatey is awesome for Windows, not as good as a package manager, and Windows needs to reboot a lot (wtf, another NTFS stupidity, I never reboot my desktop, it has uptime measured in months on average and it’s reached years a few times).

@notriddle

Do not use MSYS2.
WSL is more compatible and Powershell is more usable, while MSYS2 is neither.

Uhh, not to me, not even remotely… Plus I need to compile stuff to run on a Windows 2008 server that does not have WSL, thus compiling inside WSL I do not think will work well for that.

@notriddle

Using a Linux VM, I just tied myself in terrible knots by moving a directory in one terminal while another one is in it. I ended up with two terminals that said they were in the same directory that were actually operating on completely different ones, and I got terribly confused when changes made in one didn’t show up in another. It involved a slow-running script, so I was context switching to do something else while it was running and losing track of what all was going on.

Windows throws an error if you try to move a directory while it’s in use. There are aspects of the UNIX filesystem that are objectively worse than the way Windows does it. Go ahead and fight me.

That is because your shell did not lock the directory you were in (which I prefer it not locking it). Linux can also throw errors when you move something that is in use, it just has to actually be in use of course (and most shells release their lock as soon as they are done scanning, oh, files when using ls or so). So I do not see what is worse about this. Perhaps that you can have a program reading and one writing a file at the same time, oh wait that is not worse either (take a real-time log output from a web server and also parse it at the same time, Windows is not capable of that unless the web server releases control and re-opens the file constantly or you feed it to some intermediary first). There is nothing about NTFS that is superior to, say, ZFS (which I use).

@Azolo

Oh right, remove-item alias:iex -Force is in my profile.

That is such a wtf, why would powershell override such a basic command when an existing one exists on the path, like wtf…

@NobbZ

You can’t have VirtualBox or an Android Emulator or any other VM anymore thats not from MS when Hyper-V is activated.

Precisely this, I learned that the hard way since I was using virtualbox before hyper-v broke crap… Hyper-v is really a load of annoyance (KDE Neon GUI worked fine in virtualbox).

@sebber

I think you’re right. I’m not that windows proficient and what I did before was solutions I found after many hours of googling… But bash is nice and it both feel better to use than whichever terminal native to windows I tried and elixir seems simpler, just better off in it. Terminals in windows is just not up to par, and do you know that powershell aliases popular programs with it’s own functionality? curl is my only example, does not behave the same and to my knowledge you cannot override it… how could I trust it?
I guess the elixir/erlang-core developers could work around these issues though, seems to be a lot smoother when facing similar things in nodejs on Win.

Yeah found that out, I have curl installed systemwide, tried using it in powershell and it just kind of puked at me, since it was not curl, like wtf… No shell should override any existing application with any command unless it does precisely the exact functionality or better (like how most linux shells override [ to work faster but otherwise identically).

@sebber

Hate is of course harsh words, sorry… I just don’t like Hyper-V and it’s primarily because of my lack of knowledge about it. I’ve had issues regarding specifically docker usage and then the fact about not being able to use other virtualization software when it’s activated. I already spend too much time on things like this to learn it better… Docker was fine when it just used VirtualBox which I’ve been using for a long time on Win, Mac and Linux and I personally have multiple Dev env-setups using it

One of the big things I experience about Hyper-V is I’ve yet to find a way to have it not eat up all the ram and instead allocate on demand, like virtualbox can be set to do…

[notriddle]

@OvermindDL1

What editor does not auto-detect what line endings a file already uses?! o.O?

All of them, when you’re creating a new file.

[OvermindDL1]

@notriddle

All of them, when you’re creating a new file.

Ah, I have everything default to \n only then. ^.^
I’d not doubt that there are .gitattribute plugins for things like atom or so that can auto-detect though, or at the very least it would be so easy to make one. That is a useful idea, hmm…

[notriddle]

@OvermindDL1

Uhh, not to me, not even remotely… Plus I need to compile stuff to run on a Windows 2008 server that does not have WSL, thus compiling inside WSL I do not think will work well for that.

Cross-compilers work within WSL.

@OvermindDL1

That is such a wtf, why would powershell override such a basic command when an existing one exists on the path, like wtf…

You can’t expect Microsoft to know about every command that every OSS project has ever written. Two independent groups, neither of which heard of the other, picked the same three-letter command name. It actually happens a lot (Google’s Chromium conflicts with a game called Chromium, Rust the language conflicts with a game called Rust, multiple branches of mathematics want to claim Omega).

OTOH, overriding wget and curl was a horrible, and deliberate, choice of action.

@OvermindDL1

Yeah found that out, I have curl installed systemwide, tried using it in powershell and it just kind of puked at me, since it was not curl, like wtf… No shell should override any existing application with any command unless it does precisely the exact functionality or better (like how most linux shells override [ to work faster but otherwise identically).

Bash overrides time without providing the whole scope of functionality, so it’s not like it’s unprecedented. I just would’ve hoped people would learn better by now.

[notriddle]

@OvermindDL1

I’d not doubt that there are .gitattribute plugins for things like atom or so that can auto-detect though, or at the very least it would be so easy to make one. That is a useful idea, hmm…

The problem is that dropping a * -text into your gitattributes file doesn’t tell it to use Unix line endings. It tells it to not change them, whatever it may be. If I’m creating a .reg file for Windows, I want my text editor to use Windows line endings, and if I’m creating or editing an HL7 message, I want the lines to be terminated by a lone “\r”.

[OvermindDL1]

@notriddle

Cross-compilers work within WSL.

Does mix use cross-compilers?

@notriddle

OTOH, overriding wget and curl was a horrible, and deliberate, choice of action.

These are the ones I am referencing, plus iex. They are entirely not functionally equivalent in any form other than the absolute basics. Even the command args are different.

@notriddle

Bash overrides time without providing the whole scope of functionality, so it’s not like it’s unprecedented. I just would’ve hoped people would learn better by now.

That is for the purpose of getting more accurate timing data, which is what it’s purpose is. If you really need the default then just do env time <blah> (Remember that env <cmd> always uses the systems command, not a shell built-in).

@notriddle

The problem is that dropping a * -text into your gitattributes file doesn’t tell it to use Unix line endings. It tells it to not change them, whatever it may be. If I’m creating a .reg file for Windows, I want my text editor to use Windows line endings, and if I’m creating or editing an HL7 message, I want the lines to be terminated by a lone “\r”.

.gitattributes can specify those. text=auto means use the system default (when pulling/pushing), which also works fine for an editor default as well.

[notriddle]

@OvermindDL1

These are the ones I am referencing, plus iex. They are entirely not functionally equivalent in any form other than the absolute basics. Even the command args are different.

PowerShell iex, unlike PowerShell wget and curl, is not an attempted replacement for Elixir iex. PowerShell iex is short for Invoke-Expression. The fact that they share a name is a coincidence.

[OvermindDL1]

@notriddle

PowerShell iex is short for Invoke-Expression. The fact that they share a name is a coincidence.

Then it should be IEX, not iex.

[notriddle]

PowerShell commands are case-insensitive. Also, that would be IEx, with mixed case.

[OvermindDL1]

@notriddle

PowerShell commands are case-insensitive. Also, that would be IEx, with mixed case.

Ah true, it should be IEx.

It’s not case sensitive? Wtf? That is a good reason not to use it right there…

[notriddle]

@OvermindDL1

If you really need the default then just do env time <blah> (Remember that env <cmd> always uses the systems command, not a shell built-in).

And PowerShell has a built-in called start. I used the .bat suffix to distinguish Invoke-Expression from Interactive Elixir, but this works too:

start iex --werl

@OvermindDL1

It’s not case sensitive? Wtf? That is a good reason not to use it right there…

Executables are case-insensitive under Windows. Given a choice, I’d rather have the PowerShell builtins also be case insensitive than have exes and builtins disagree.

Also, having executables on your system with names that differ only in case is a serious system configuration smell.

[OvermindDL1]

@notriddle

And PowerShell has a built-in called start. I used the .bat suffix to distinguish Invoke-Expression from Interactive Elixir, but this works too:

Oooo, useful, I’ll give that a try next time I need. Thanks!

@notriddle

Executables are case-insensitive under Windows. Given a choice, I’d rather have the PowerShell builtins also be case insensitive than have exes and builtins disagree.

Not under Windows, but rather under the filesystems it includes by default. A custom filesystem does not need such a limitation as case-insensitivity.

@notriddle

Also, having executables on your system with names that differ only in case is a serious system configuration smell.

Executables sure, but not commands. I’ve made a LOT of functions and aliases and such in my shell that differ from an executable via just their case so that I can have special functionality without needing to replace the existing functionality.

This is also why it is a wtf that powershell has case-insensitive ‘commands’. o.O?!

[notriddle]

@OvermindDL1

Not under Windows, but rather under the filesystems it includes by default. A custom filesystem does not need such a limitation as case-insensitivity.

False. Case-insensitive semantics are provided by the Win32 subsystem on top of whatever native filesystem you’re using. With the right API calls, I can do this:

NTFS is capable of a lot. It’s the Win32 subsystem that limits you.