Using WSLC with DevContainers

[rbaker5]

There's multiple options for using WLSC with DevContainers, and it's not clear which is likely to the recommendation going forward.

1. Store files on the Windows filesystem, and create a devcontainer from there. This is the only thing that works out of the box today. Downsides involve the file system difference, hosting files used for Linux development in a non-linux filesystem.
2. Store files in a WSL instance, and load a devcontainer under WSLC from there. This doesn't work out of the box. I've managed to get it working through a customer wslc shell script redirector, but I'm left with concerns. For one, the WSLc container represent the execute bit of every file as set. This might be fixable by more wslc customization, or maybe that entire process will be resolved.

In a sense (2) seems like the better long term option, but given that it requires customization to get working today, is there another thought here? The changes to virtiofs seem to be trying to making it more reasonable to host files used for Linux development on a non-linux filesystem.

Addendum
If you're interested in option 2, here is my workaround: https://github.com/rbaker5/wslc-devcontainers-via-wsl. It wraps wslc.exe in a shell script that avoids some errors that under ms-vscode-remote.remote-containers, 0.465.0 with wslc 2.9.3.0, causes it to fail. Tested for Ubuntu 24.04.

[Roemer]

The main issue I have with 1.) is that this makes working with many files (e.g. node) very slow, especially if file scanning (or multiple) are running. I would prefer to keep the files in Linux, in the host where the container runs.