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Comment by Karunamon | Hacker News Reader

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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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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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

Those aren't operating under the restrictions imposed by Windows.

> 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.

I've always used apt-cyg to install things, which works OK.

apt-get install whatever from any ubuntu repository

Not sure about X11 apps, but whatever. Largely this makes running a special win32 build of redis for whatever dev you're doing unnecessary.

I'm currently running windows on this laptop, but I have a virtualbox instance running Lubuntu for doing any UNIX specific dev. Ports and files are shared across windows and linux transparently, which means there's far less need for need for running+maintaining a separate developer's VM.

I would assume much better stability and integration. If this works as I expect, I will be able to do things like apt-get install which is a huge improvement over cygwin. Another benefit is that since it's Ubuntu tools and projects will support it vs cygwin which is usually "we don't use it, so figure it out and then we'll post it here for all the other poor saps using cygwin"

I think so. Cygwin is good enough to use UNIX tools in Windows. But maybe they will support better packages than Cygwin.

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