On 1/28/25 7:58 AM, George Rawlinson wrote: Hi George, Thanks for sharing thoughts!
If I remember correctly, this was suggested before and shot down because WSL is its own can of beans, and mainly because having this “official” implies that we will “support” this in the way of bug reports etc etc.
WSL has come a long way since then, and it's way less its own can of beans that it once was. Since WSL2, this basically consists of running a container image. Actually, as I said in my initial mail, our current base container image is already usable _as-is_ with WSL2. Providing a WSL specific image is solely to bring a slightly better experience out of the box. As such, since the design and usage will be pretty similar, I think we could provide the same level of support that we provide for our OCI images and Arch boxes (whatever that level is, I'm actually not sure to which level we provide support for those to be honest). If anything, I'm personally totally fine "officially" distributing WSL images while still providing limited support for it! Just to make things clear, WSL1 would be out of scope / unsupported.
My feelings remain the same, I have zero interest in spending time on any WSL related issues.
Fair enough. As I said though, WSL has come a long way since the last time this was brought up and I don't expect much WSL specific issues or "common" packages to behave differently then on our Docker image or an x86_64 host (at least from my own experience). For what it's worth, I have been using both Arch (via an unofficial image) and Debian on WSL for the past few years as development environments for my day job. Apart from a few eventual issues regarding the `systemd` support (which, if I remember correctly, were all upstream WSL issues and not specific to Arch), I don't remember facing much (if not any) issues specific to WSL, or issues that I wouldn't face on our Docker image or an x86_64 host. Again, in terms of usage & behavior, it should be pretty similar to our official Docker image nowadays. As I said earlier though, I'm totally fine supporting this at a best effort / limited level if anything. I understand the concern about dealing with WSL related issues. While I don't expect much of them, asking package maintainers to spend time on WSL related issues is not the aim, indeed. I guess every bug report related to WSL can be contained in the related repo? Thanks again for sharing thoughts :) -- Regards, Robin Candau / Antiz