asdf-vm on Windows

Windows 11 seems to be shaping up to be a nicer experience than macOS, but I find myself really missing the convenience of asdf when I'm using it. Let's try porting it.

Thoughts

• MSYS2 seems like a great base for this.
  • For now let's rely on it being externally installed and its bash being first on PATH.
  • Later we might ship an installer bundling MSYS2 and the configuration we need.
  • We want our files to live in $USERPROFILE, so we need to set $HOME to it. Edit /etc/nsswitch.conf and ensure db_home has windows before other values.
• We'll need to mess around with $PATH a bit.
  • Windows includes tools like FIND which are incongruent with the Unix tools plugins expect.
  • Can we safely bump C:\Windows\system32 after MSYS2 on PATH in our wrapper?
• I'm conflating PowerShell with Windows for the time being, we can figure out other platforms later.

Progress

• PowerShell wrapper
• Command Prompt wrapper
• Generate *.cmd shims
  • Also need to strip .exe file extension from shell shims
  • Update the obsolete shim removal code to leave valid *.cmd shims alone
• Get some plugins working:
  • nodejs
    • Depends on Python
    • Will need to get node-build working first
      • To use custom build, set ASDF_NODEJS_NODEBUILD
    • Get binary installations working
    • Generate shims in bin for corepack, node, npm, and npx
    • Get source installations working
  • task
    • Handle binary files having file extensions
    • Extract zip files
    • Use PROCESSOR_ARCHITECTURE if available so we can run ARM64 builds?

Diffs

• asdf
• asdf-task
• node-build
• asdf-nodejs

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Backlinks

• 2023-01-21 (internal) (Private)
• 2023-02-05 (internal) (Private)