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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

Usually it helps by adopting Windows development practices instead of trying to cram UNIX workflows into it.

Who on their right mind uses ssh/scp on Windows development other than connecting to UNIX boxes?

I use gitlab for ci/cd, a gitlab-runner runs on a windows based system (legacy aka not .net core so can only build with msbuild.exe). Now I have to copy this release to another windows based system. Are you calling me stupid for using scp via openssh? Would like to hear an alternative? Took me like 5 minutes to set openssh up.

Windows has a mechanism for sharing folders; the protocol is SMB (CIFS is a dialect of SMB). You mount the the target and destination folders on the same machine (doesn't matter which one mounts the other), and then copy the file locally on the machine where they're both mounted.

That's my primary issue with Windows workflows, though. Unless you really convert over to using pretty much only MS tools, it is extremely hard to use them. Meanwhile the "Unix" workflow tends to be a collection of many open source tools with lots of competing solutions.

What’s the alternative? I was deploying from a Mac, so connecting to a Unix box is exactly what I was doing.

A possible alternative.

https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/share-mac-files-wit...

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/remote/remot...

Another alternative,

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/learn/...

I was deploying to a fleet of servers. Having every engineer add every server via the macOS sharing UI or using RDP to manually connect to each host doesn’t seem scalable. Maybe remote power shell sessions would work, but I’m not even sure if there is a power shell client for Mac, and it’s also not clear if remote power shell sessions would fix the open file handle issue.

Experienced Windows devs I talked to said they used Packer from Hashicorp to entirely recreate their server image whenever they wanted to deploy. This process takes hours, but that was the best I found.

> Who on their right mind uses ssh/scp on Windows development other than connecting to UNIX boxes?

Exactly. That's like complaining that I can't RDP into a linux box to install the toolchain!

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