[ANN] This Week in LiveCode 259

[Andre Garzia]

> On 24 Mar 2021, at 23:50, Richard Gaskin via use-livecode <use-livecode at lists.runrev.com> wrote:
> 
> And with Windows 10, Microsoft is now embracing Linux in its Windows Subsystem for Linux, so Win folk can enjoy industry standard tooling on all OSes:

Just be aware that WSL is not activated by default, and you can’t assume which distro is installed (even though Ubuntu is probably 90% of the installs). There are shell commands you can use to probe if WSL is installed, which distros are installed, and also execute something on a specific installed distro.

All that is possible but it is not exactly trivial. Windows is quite flexible in a way that most systems are not. You might be running on Intel or ARM, you might be running 32bits or 64bits, you might be using cmd, powershell 5 or 7, bash, who knows what shell is running. Your distros under WSL might be WSL1 (which is syscall translations) or WSL2 (which is hypervisor emulator). You kinda need to take those things into account if you’re running shell() commands or trying to bundle binaries.

If you have control of the Windows machine, then you can set it up to run as you want, but if you’re shipping software for end-users, you can’t assume WSL Ubuntu is there so you can run rsync.

I know you didn’t say that but often I see scripts in other communities that assume a ton of stuff (even on macOS where many scripts assume homebrew is present).