Hey everyone, TLDR: I think we should stop testing on WSL.
History of WSL and our testing on it: Around a year ago, we introduced WSL runners to test BuildStream, since WSL1 had many weird quirks compared to running on a real Linux environment. This allowed us to catch quite a few bugs on this platform. However, the platform has evolved a lot. We now have WSL2, which is a Linux VM, running on HyperV, with a real kernel and all we need. I haven't found a single bug on WSL2 that I would not have seen on Ubuntu 20.04 (which is the version my WSL system use). Microsoft recently announced that they would release WSL2 to Windows 1903 and 1909 too. Given this, I don't think there is much of an incentive for users to stay on WSL1, and would thus expect most people to move to WSL2. With the work to move to GitHub and GitHub Actions, it was seen that the WSL runners there were quite flaky and thus hard to trust the tests running there. What we would loose: WSL1 is currently the only test that tests BuildStream on a non-linux kernel (being an emulated kernel with not everything present, thus behaving more like a generic unix system). So we would lose our current tests around unix-ish systems. I believe that this is not enough a reason to keep WSL1 tests, and that, when we will have moved to GitHub actions, we should be able to have Mac tests instead, which would bring better value. I therefore think we should remove the WSL runners already now. Any thoughts? Cheers, Ben
