Azure-cli: Installing azure-cli tools from official Microsoft repos stalls on Debian/Ubuntu on WSL

[sirredbeard]

Describe the bug

Installing azure-cli tools from the official Microsoft repos stalls for a very long time when installed using apt on Debian/Ubuntu-based distros on Windows Subsystem for Linux.

It can often stall for 10-25 minutes for an unclear purpose on WSL, see these reports here.

To Reproduce

Follow steps to add azure-cli repo to /etc/apt/sources.list via apt on Debian or Ubuntu.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt install azure-cli -y

Expected behavior

azure-cli is installed without long delays.

Environment summary

Debian stretch on Windows Subsystem for Linux

Additional context
Add any other context about the problem here.

[sirredbeard]

The delay is the extensive install script in the background.

[jlorich]

I don't think this should be closed. The install time on Linux compared to other platforms is insane and makes for a terrible and confusing experience.

[pasisavolainen]

Time spent in installation seems to be dpkg:

$ ps aux
USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
...
root     23697 47.5  0.1  49808 38040 pts/5    Ss   13:58   7:38 /usr/bin/dpkg --status-fd 30 --no-triggers --unpack --auto-deconfigure --recursive /tmp/apt-dpkg-install-rS1iJh`

This triggers every single update for me, 30-40 minutes easily.

[sirredbeard]

The time spent is because Azure-CLI is unpacking it's own Python 2 distribution. It is slow because WSL1 file I/O is slow. Some status updates during the install could be implemented.

[pasisavolainen]

@sirredbeard I'm guessing the python2 dependency isn't going anywhere soon, but how about taking it out into separate package and "just" sym/hardlinking into it from the proper azure-cli package? Again guessing that rate of change in python2 stuff is much lower than az itself

[sirredbeard]

@pasisavolainen Well Python 2 reaches EOL in 7 months. I imagine they will move to Python 3 and will still bundle it.