Ubuntu WSL 22.04 updated ubuntu-wsl package has many new dependencies

WSL
1

Today I noticed that the newest update to Ubuntu 22.04 wants to install 101 new packages and occupy additional 255 MB of disk space:

$ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description:    Ubuntu 22.04.5 LTS
Release:        22.04
Codename:       jammy

$ sudo apt dist-upgrade -V
...
The following packages will be upgraded:
   ubuntu-minimal (1.481.3 => 1.481.4)
   ubuntu-server (1.481.3 => 1.481.4)
   ubuntu-standard (1.481.3 => 1.481.4)
   ubuntu-wsl (1.481.3 => 1.481.4)
4 upgraded, 101 newly installed, 0 to remove and 1 not upgraded.
Need to get 57.2 MB of archives.
After this operation, 255 MB of additional disk space will be used.

It seems that majority of the new packages are added through new X11 related dependencies. Here are the dependency changes:

$ diff -u1 <(apt-cache -i depends ubuntu-wsl=1.481.3) <(apt-cache -i depends ubuntu-wsl=1.481.4)
--- /dev/fd/63  2024-09-25 15:48:14.202281012 +0200
+++ /dev/fd/62  2024-09-25 15:48:14.202281012 +0200
@@ -5,11 +5,21 @@
   Depends: curl
+  Depends: dbus-x11
   Depends: dirmngr
-  Depends: fonts-ubuntu
+  Depends: ed
+  Depends: file
   Depends: git
   Depends: gnupg
-  Depends: htop
+  Depends: info
+  Depends: libegl1
+  Depends: libgl1
+  Depends: libgtk-3-0
+  Depends: libpam-systemd
+  Depends: lsof
+  Depends: man-db
+  Depends: media-types
   Depends: patch
-  Depends: screen
+  Depends: psmisc
+  Depends: rsync
   Depends: software-properties-common
-  Depends: tmux
+  Depends: time
   Depends: vim
@@ -18,2 +28,3 @@
     vim-nox
+  Depends: wget
   Depends: wsl-setup

Is it really necessary to extend the dependencies so much? I certainly would not expect such a huge change in an LTS version of Ubuntu.

2

Below is the changelog of the ubuntu_meta package which is source for ubuntu-wsl. The change was made by Didier Roche-Tolomelli @didirocks but there is no explanation for it.

https://changelogs.ubuntu.com/changelogs/pool/main/u/ubuntu-meta/ubuntu-meta_1.481.4/changelog

3

…perhaps there was a quality control bump? I tried tracing the trail for just rsync and it lead me to debian where they updated software for QC reasons and of course this causes a ripple effect everywhere.

4

You can see the main reasons on the linked but report to the package.

The goal is to align your WSL experience with the necessary tooling to get both cross-compatibility with the Windows Interroperability (Supporting GUI applications) with what you experience already in 24.04 LTS. You will notice also that some packages were removed too (you can purge them with apt autoremove --purge).

We will continue to align the tech stack we ship between all published applications and put our best effort to trim down the image in future updates as there are clear opportunities to do so.

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5

Thank you. I did not notice that there is the bug report number in the changelog.

I guess that there is a considerable number of Ubuntu WSL users which do not use X11 and which may welcome smaller installations but maybe it is not worth having two variants of Ubuntu WSL installations. Was this discussed?

6

I guess that there is a considerable number of Ubuntu WSL users which do not use X11 and which may welcome smaller installations but maybe it is not worth having two variants of Ubuntu WSL installations. Was this discussed?

It wasn’t discussed so far but that’s clearly something we can consider. I will bring the topic to be discussed when we are going to plan for 25.04, so that we can assess the impact, and see what would be the option to trim down the image by either having different flavors of it, bringing a -minimal variant or metapackage, or other options we could explore. Of course, we don’t want to loose the users in too many options either, and have them selecting the wrong options for their needs in a complexity matrix that could quickly explode, both in term of usage and testing. We’ll definitively have a look. Thanks for reaching out! :slight_smile:

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