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Microsoft and Canonical partner to bring Ubuntu to Windows 10

(www.zdnet.com)
535 points raddad | 9 comments | 30 Mar 16 11:12 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source | bottom
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typon ◴[30 Mar 16 13:46 UTC] No.11389194[source]▶
This might be the most exciting news I've heard in a long time. Being able to use Visual Studio and .NET for web development while using zsh and all the other Linux tools? Dreamland.
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Karunamon ◴[30 Mar 16 14:16 UTC] No.11389399[source]▶
Serious, non-snarky question:

What does this give you that you would not already have with cygwin? The latter installs .exe versions of the usual command line utils, and I'm almost certain ZSH and the others you speak of are included.

I do not understand the practical implications of this move by Canonical/MS other than PR - what's actually changing from a user/dev standpoint?

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1. metafex ◴[30 Mar 16 14:37 UTC] No.11389555[source]▶
Cygwin is and always will be only an emulation-layer, never the real deal. For most day-to-day things it works perfectly, but when you run into some corner-case, most of the time you are out of luck.

My only real problem with Cygwin is, that it misses a command-line package manager. If they could adopt pacman for package management like MSYS2 does, I'd be a happy camper.

edit: To deploy Cygwin based applications you need to get a commercial license from RedHat (if it's not FOSS). Which could be a deal-breaker.

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2. typon ◴[30 Mar 16 14:42 UTC] No.11389592[source]▶
This is a good answer. I always feel limited in Cygwin, it doesn't feel quite right. And it takes quite a bit of tweaking to get working correctly. Case in point: Try getting gvim to work properly from Cygwin.
3. tavert ◴[30 Mar 16 15:08 UTC] No.11389811[source]▶
You realize cygwin's setup.exe package manager has a CLI, right? The issue with pacman in msys2 is that it's posix dependent, which fails badly at updating the core posix layer itself. Cygwin's setup.exe is a native Windows executable and doesn't have this self hosting problem.
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4. koenigdavidmj ◴[30 Mar 16 15:28 UTC] No.11390000[source]▶
That doesn't solve the problem that if it is trying to update the Cygwin DLL, you need to shut down everything. And if there's an update to something like bash or coreutils, same thing (since Windows does not allow writing to executables that are running).
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5. tavert ◴[30 Mar 16 16:13 UTC] No.11390337{3}[source]▶
Sure. But self-hosting pacman makes it literally impossible to do correctly. Updating cygwin itself should be done by an outside-of-cygwin solution to invoke setup.exe, just write a little powershell provisioning script or something.
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6. shadowfox ◴[30 Mar 16 16:31 UTC] No.11390496[source]▶
> My only real problem with Cygwin is, that it misses a command-line package manager. If they could adopt pacman for package management like MSYS2 does

There is babun (https://babun.github.io/). It is essentially a wrapper around cygwin and comes with a package manager.

7. emodendroket ◴[30 Mar 16 16:42 UTC] No.11390620[source]▶
I've always used apt-cyg to install things, which works OK.
8. Macha ◴[30 Mar 16 17:13 UTC] No.11390977{4}[source]▶
?

Arch is certainly capable of updating pacman via pacman,and it's been a while but I'm pretty sure you can update apt/dpkg via the usual apt-get upgrade on Ubuntu

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9. tavert ◴[30 Mar 16 18:01 UTC] No.11391493{5}[source]▶
Those aren't operating under the restrictions imposed by Windows.