WSL support

[fonsp]

To support WSL, you just check for WSL, and run the same command as in the Sys.iswindows() case.

The question is what to do with paths: one option is to assume that the provided path is a linux path, and then use

path_translated_to_windows = read(`wslpath -w $(abs_path)`, String)

to get the Windows path.

For example:

Note: you can use this snippet to resolve ~ and .. to absolute paths.

Another option is to detect whether the path is a linux path, windows path, or something else (e.g. URL), and convert approriately.

A third option is to let the function caller decide, but that is less cross-platformy.

[tpapp]

What happens with the current master on WSL?

[fonsp]

Sorry, here you go:

It doesn't have xdg-open, and even if it would - you don't want to launch (graphical) apps inside the WSL, they should launch on the host Windows instead.

WSL and the host have interoperability - you can call cmd.exe [arguments] as a linux command

[tpapp]

Thanks. I will think about this.

Since I have not used Windows for decades, I am unfamiliar with WSL, so I am not sure what users want in this case.

WSL users, please chime in here.

[fonsp]

@mgautam98

[fonsp]

I thought about it again, and I'd like to correct myself:

If you are using Julia inside WSL, then the Linux filesystem is the only filesystem that you use. This is how WSL works - programs run in actual linux, including the file system. You even access Windows files as /mnt/c/Users/fonsi/Documents/..., i.e. via Linuxified "proxy".

So I believe that you will always call DefaultApplication.open(linux_path) (or DefaultApplication.open(url)), and never DefaultApplication.open(windows_path). (But please correct me if I missed something.) This is reflected in the rest of Julia: inside WSL, tempdir() gives /tmp, joindir("a","b") gives a/b, not a\\b, homedir() gives /home/fonsi/, not the Windows path, etc. If Julia is running on WSL, you can assume that a path::String is a linux path.

So the question is: if you are running WSL and you call DefaultApplication.open(path), should it open the Windows default app with that file (transformed to a Windows path), or a Linux app?

My take on this is: you use DefaultApplication.jl to open GUI applications. WSL can technically run an X server, but this is not the default, and I believe that it is used very very rarely, and only for a couple of specialized apps.

[tpapp]

I sympathetic to this solution, and will revisit this again when JuliaLang/julia#36425 is merged and/or JuliaLang/julia#36354 is resolved some other way.

[tpapp]

Fixed by #17.