WSL2 corrupting Git repositories and shell history • Hacker News Board

Re: WSL2 corrupting Git repositories and shell history

#141

Post by wila » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 5:29 PM UTC

harikb wrote: post #30

crispyambulance wrote: post #23

I think calling it WSL2 was a mistake. The predecessor, WSL, "just worked" and it was more a less a linux experience for most practical purposes-- and certainly better than hoary old cygwin. This caused a lot of people to believe they could just transition to WSL2, lead on by the promise of an even more performant linux experience. The documentation didn't say anything about complications from attempting this, so a l…

File system corruption is unforgivable mistake, but FS work is really hard to get right. Even stuff like VMware corrupts shared folders ... wherever they try to bypass a driver translation layer. Just Google for “vmware shared folder corruption”

Interesting. I basically live at the VMware community forums and could not remember this issue...

FWIW I am a user moderator down there and VMware desktop products (Workstation/Fusion/Player) has my focus and as a result I basically read almost every post that would report this issue.

I just DDG'ed it and see one report from 2014 [0], ok some more from around 2008 when using google.

Looks like this was resolved in 2015 as that was the last time I see it being mentioned.

[0] https://communities.vmware.com/thread/485062

Re: WSL2 corrupting Git repositories and shell history

#142

Post by pottertheotter » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 5:30 PM UTC

johnchristopher wrote: post #86

> Feel like booting Linux on a separate disk because of these issues. It always seemed strange to me that people would rather use WSL than the real thing when Windows doesn't bring much advantage. What am I missing ?

This is why I like macOS so much. I understand that it's not the same as having Ubuntu in WSL, but using the Mac terminal is so close to the experience I have when I SSH into my Ubuntu box that it's nearly 1:1 for me.

Re: WSL2 corrupting Git repositories and shell history

#143

Post by magicalhippo » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 5:31 PM UTC

chrisandchris wrote: post #139

larrik wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The web version of Outlook has come a long way, and in my opinion has become the superior product (for my use cases, at least).

The web version does work until you need to sign into more than 2 accounts per day (1 in regular, 1 in private). If you need more than 2 accounts, it does not work anymore. Edit: it does work, but it will sign you out from all M365 services which requires a lot of logins for nothing.

Couldn't you just use Firefox Containers for that? Seems to work fine for Google stuff.

Re: WSL2 corrupting Git repositories and shell history

#144

Post by easton » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 5:31 PM UTC

BlueTemplar wrote: post #36

jayflux wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very useful for projects that require (or work better in) a linux environment. I don't want to start up a full linux VM, that sounds like a lot of overhead and I'm more likely to not bother at all. WSL is much lighter than that (we're not talking virtualbox here), if I open windows terminal its up and running, there's almost-zero start up cost. With VSCode I can switch between working in WSL and windows easily,…

You've not explained why you would not run a native Linux system in the first place…

Office, which doesn’t have a good replacement on the web or on Linux.

Re: WSL2 corrupting Git repositories and shell history

#145

Post by weswpg » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 5:31 PM UTC

johnchristopher wrote: post #86

> Feel like booting Linux on a separate disk because of these issues. It always seemed strange to me that people would rather use WSL than the real thing when Windows doesn't bring much advantage. What am I missing ?

Games and MS Office are a big draw but the deal killer app for me is OneNote because unlike Note-taking options on Linux, it syncs to iOS and screenshots go straight into my current note (no need to copy and paste)

Re: WSL2 corrupting Git repositories and shell history

#146

Post by pjmlp » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 5:32 PM UTC

uncledave wrote: post #84

robbyt wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rushing half-finished products out, offering little/zero support is the new Microsoft. The reason $MSFT loves open source is because they can get press hype over projects that are 75% complete (which is the main goal), and they don't even need to support it, document it, or make it actually work.

Yeah I think you nailed it there actually. That's exactly their modus operandi. What's even worse is they have managed to abstract most of the support away in this cycle. You can't get enterprise support now because they gutted that entirely. You can't get them to do anything on github because they keep moving all the projects around and erasing them all or auto closing the tickets and no one on first line support kn…

If it works for Facebook and Google, with its legions of coffee shop developers, why not for others.

Re: WSL2 corrupting Git repositories and shell history

#147

Post by naikrovek » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 5:33 PM UTC

uncledave wrote: post #84

robbyt wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rushing half-finished products out, offering little/zero support is the new Microsoft. The reason $MSFT loves open source is because they can get press hype over projects that are 75% complete (which is the main goal), and they don't even need to support it, document it, or make it actually work.

Yeah I think you nailed it there actually. That's exactly their modus operandi. What's even worse is they have managed to abstract most of the support away in this cycle. You can't get enterprise support now because they gutted that entirely. You can't get them to do anything on github because they keep moving all the projects around and erasing them all or auto closing the tickets and no one on first line support kn…

> Yeah I think you nailed it there actually. That's exactly their modus operandi.

They're following the "rules" from "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", remember. Specifically, the "Release early and often" bit, for the purposes of this conversation. Microsoft are considered "good open source citizens" because of the changes they've made to follow the written non-rules as well as the the unwritten rules.

If you're going to fault Microsoft for following the rules, fault EVERYONE ELSE that does it as well.

I want people to realize that they crap on Microsoft hard for things that they gladly accept from other developers or other companies. The double standards in the IT community are absolutely insane.

Re: WSL2 corrupting Git repositories and shell history

#148

Post by cambalache » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 5:34 PM UTC

dmurray wrote: post #121

cambalache wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I develop Rails in WSL1 just fine. > Postgres never worked for example natively. That's a minor incovenience at worst. I will stay put in WSL1. If I wished a VM I would have just installed VMWare and run some Linux ISO image from it.

> That's a minor incovenience at worst. What a bizarre claim. It's irrelevant if you don't need Postgres, a minor inconvenience if you can easily adopt a workaround, and a show stopper if you were relying on accessing a local Postgres instance.

Have you developed in this environment? I have developed more than 20 sites in WSL1, all with PG as the DB. I have it running in the same machine in windows for developemnt(which you are running otherwise you wouldnt be in WSL).Instead of using "localhost" you use "127.0.0.1" in your configuration, that's it.

Re: WSL2 corrupting Git repositories and shell history

#149

Post by semicolon_storm » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 5:34 PM UTC

johnchristopher wrote: post #86

> Feel like booting Linux on a separate disk because of these issues. It always seemed strange to me that people would rather use WSL than the real thing when Windows doesn't bring much advantage. What am I missing ?

Company IT policies. Can't make *nix the main OS, can't easily dualboot, and running the dev workspace in a VM is slow.

The answer, at least in my case, has been using Windows where I must and WSL for whatever I can.

Re: WSL2 corrupting Git repositories and shell history

#150

Post by the8472 » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 5:36 PM UTC

tremon wrote: post #22

tutfbhuf wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why? WSL1 was something like wine but reverse, but WSL2 is actually linux.

The problem is likely not in the Ext4 code, but in the block I/O driver (which is Hyper-V specific, IIRC) or even in Hyper-V itself. Several reports mention Windows shutdowns, sleep or hibernation, so it may be a simple unclean shutdown of the VM. A bigger problem would be if Hyper-V is either ignoring memory barriers, or caching writes to the disk and losing them when the Hyper-V service is shutdown. But that would…

Virtualbox has (had?) similar issues in certain configurations where it maintains a small write cache and doesn't honor IO barriers which lead to journaled/cow filesystems reporting an inconsistent state that should have been prevented by journaling.