Re: [musl] Advocating musl to in windows subsystem and OS X

[Ariadne Conill <ariadne@dereferenced.org>]

On Friday, June 12, 2020 1:05:02 PM MDT Luca Barbato wrote:
> On 12/06/2020 19:37, Rich Felker wrote:
> > On Fri, Jun 12, 2020 at 06:56:28PM +0200, Brian Peregrine wrote:
> >> Hey all,
> >> 
> >> after thinking about my previous post (Advocating musl to the chromium
> >> OS developers ), it struck me that both Microsoft and Apple use some
> >> sort of libc too (Microsoft has the "subsystem for linux" on windows
> >> 10 now, and Apple's OS X is based on linux too -I think it was based
> >> on the "Darwin" linux distro.
> > 
> > No, OSX is in some sense a BSD fork, but with major architectural
> > changes, and has nothing to do with Linux. Their libc is a BSD one
> > (FreeBSD I think) with tons of gratuitous changes made that did little
> > but intentionally break things, basically for NIH purposes/justifying
> > the existence of the project. (This is much like Google's Fuchsia fork
> > of musl.)
> > 
> > musl does not run on OSX and while all of the pure-library code and
> > stdio code could in principle be used, actually making "musl for OSX"
> > would be a large project that doesn't make sense. What would make much
> > more sense is either reusing code or making corresponding improvements
> > based on things that are better in musl.
> > 
> >> Microsoft probably uses glibc (as the subsystem seems to be
> >> canonical-made and they use glibc in ubuntu), for os x, I'm not sure
> >> what is being used.
> >> See https://itsfoss.com/install-bash-on-windows/
> >> https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/microsoft-linux-distros-windows-10/
> >> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3601092
> >> 
> >> In either case, Rich, perhaps you can propose to both that they use
> >> musl,
> > 
> > In some sense WSL doesn't "use" any libc; it's a thin syscall
> > emulation layer (WSL1) or near-full-linux-vm (WSL2) that's supposed to
> > be able to run any Linux userspace. My understanding is that they ship
> > some glibc-based distro, and I don't see that being viable for them to
> > change because they're supporting whatever users have built on it, but
> > anyone's free to use whatever they prefer.
> > 
> > On a higher level, I don't really want anyone shipping musl in places
> > where the end user who receives it doesn't intend to use musl, for
> > much the same reason that I don't like it when distros ship systemd to
> > folks who don't intend to use systemd. It leads to gratuitous
> > complaints from people who are unhappy that it's different from what
> > they expect, and keep asking for changes to make it more glibc-like.
> > I'd much rather seek out a user base that *wants* what's different
> > about musl rather than "puts up with" what's different about musl.
> 
> https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/alpine-wsl/9p804crf0395#activetab=pivot:ov
> erviewtab
> 
> This seems available.

It is also not supported at all by Alpine team itself, and apk-tools 3 will 
break with WSL1 due to the way the new database code uses mmap access.

In other words, if it breaks, you get to keep both pieces.

Ariadne