Odm: [Idea] odm.exe wrapper around WSL on Windows

[pierotofy]

Started looking a little more into WSL under Windows 10: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Subsystem_for_Linux

After having successfully compiled and run ODM using WSL, I was wondering how to improve things. Docker's great, but it's not the easiest it could be. Ideally I would like to run something like:

C:\ odm.exe --project-path Users\myuser\drone myproject

And be done with it. No compilation should be required and paths should be expressed using Windows conventions.

WSL gets us half-way there. You can't just make a tarball of ODM files after compilation, because lib dependencies are embedded within the Ubuntu system, so we still need the full Ubuntu system. But you cannot release a full distro on the Windows Store (not at the moment, anyway).

An interesting module/subproject for ODM would be the creation of a odm.exe wrapper that:

• Checks that Ubuntu is installed with WSL
• Downloads a tarball of the docker image's filesystem (the entire system) if necessary
• chroots into the above filesystem
• Converts Windows style paths and locations to work in the Ubuntu WSL
• Executes ./run.sh.

Seems doable to me. Just need to find time 😄 and/or other volunteers.

[MattWenham]

Seems you're about a year ahead of me, but I did just get ODM to run successfully on a very low-powered tablet (I'm on vacation) with 6GB of RAM and 4GB of virtual memory.

The above sounds like a great proposition, I will investigate further if I find the time.

Another alternative might be a PowerShell script?

[pierotofy]

PowerShell could work also, yes.

[MattWenham]

I don't think it even needs PowerShell, a straight batch file might work.

If I'm tarballing the OpenDroneMap_v0_3_1 folder, which file extensions and subfolders can I safely exclude for the software to work when restored? I'm thinking of source and object files?

This will be massively useful: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/share-environment-vars-between-wsl-and-windows/

[smathermather]

@pierotofy -- I will close for now.

[pierotofy]

Yep, the idea was good in principle, but MS has back-tracked on WSL 1.0 and their implementation of WSL 2.0 is a half-baked solution IMO. Pity...

[smathermather]

That's such a shame.