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Date: Wed, 13 Apr 2016 07:56:19 -0500
From: "KARL BOTTS" <kdbotts AT usa DOT net>
To: <cygwin AT cygwin DOT com>
Subject: RE: native Linux userland in Windows 10
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What baffles me is, why didn't MS just arrange to support Cygwin more
directly, e.g., make a "blessed" distribution mechanism for Cygwin available
to their users?  Surely this could have been worked out: they have some sort
of "partnership" with RedHat, they claim.

I put a lengthy comment to that effect in the forum associated with that
video, after a colleague who was at the "Build Conference" in SF emailed it to
me last week.  (There may be more than one video.)

I do not think they have really considered the integration issues that Cygwin
has mostly solved.  Not just permissions, but small things like cygpath and
such utilities.  No doubt they can, but will they stick to it long enough to
make everything work?  I have my doubts.

Remember, they have tried basically the same thing at least twice before: the
"POSIX Subsystem" of WinNT, and the "Unix Tools for Windows".  Both failed and
have been abandoned.  And PowerShell is sort of another try: do you all know
that they started from the old ksh sources, somehow?  But they totally screwed
up PS, from my point of view, by making it deal primarily with binary streams
of proprietary data instead of text.  That may make it better for a former
CMD.EXE user, but it does not integrate at all with anything else.  For
instance, trying to pipe PS output into a bash script, or vice versa, is a
nightmare.  I have given up.

At the end of the day, mass Windows users just don't get the whole idea of a
shell as an integrator of software tools.  They think it is supposed to make
pretty pictures in a console emulator, as a poor substitute for a GUI.  I
suspect that will lead MS to screw up their Unix environment, to make it more
friendly to their primary user base.  Which will make it useless to me.

I could be wrong.  I'll give it a year or two to settle, and then give it a
try.  I just hope it does not interfere too much with my Cygwin setup, which I
expect to keep for the foreseeable future.


---
Karl Botts, kdbotts AT usa DOT net


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