How to disable WSL on windows-latest/windows-2019 for Github Action

[zdtsw]

Background:
we used to use windows-2016 in our github action workflows, till recently realized it is not supported any more. thus, upgraded it to windows-2019/windows-latest.

what the action job is configed to run:

• on windows install "cygwin" and a bunch of tools (e.g make, git, antcontrib, etc)
• run "make" which in turn to call "ant" build in order to run java tests.
• one of the target in the "ant" is to do "git clone" some extra repo.

I believe it was working on windows-2016 till now on windows-2019/latest.
the error I got when the line of "git clone" hit is:

     [exec] Windows Subsystem for Linux has no installed distributions.
     [exec] Distributions can be installed by visiting the Microsoft Store:
     [exec] https://aka.ms/wslstore

I am only guessing, this is because wsl is messed up with cygwin, so if i am able to disable wsl by pwsh as the first step, then cygwin and so on should still work.
(or maybe I am totally wrong.....)
just wanna see if anyone has idea how to fix this.

P.S: I've tried to remove the customized logic (to install cygwin, git, make, ant etc) just let windows-2019 wls handle everything as stated
but then the path seems also mixed up with both "" and "/"

P.S2: I've also tried with

- name: Disable WSLv1
      run: |
        Disable-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -FeatureName Microsoft-Windows-Subsystem-Linux
      shell: pwsh

but does not work as well....

[zdtsw]

I have also tried to use

    - uses: Vampire/setup-wsl@v1
      with:
        distribution: Ubuntu-20.04
        additional-packages:
          ant
          make

seems the error of

     [exec] Windows Subsystem for Linux has no installed distributions.
     [exec] Distributions can be installed by visiting the Microsoft Store:
     [exec] https://aka.ms/wslstore
```   i
s gone, but still might be good to know what is the best way to handle these windows instances since 2019+ became the only available ones

[sogaiu]

Rather late to the party, but I encountered a similar issue where it appeared that bash would cause c:\windows\system32\bash.exe to execute [1], leading to what looked like the "wsl triggering" described above.

At least, that's what this answer to the question "Why executing 'bash' in the terminal opens wsl on Windows 10?" seemed to suggest [2].

I didn't find a good way to disable WSL (nor convince the runner via setting PATH to stay away from c:\windows\system32\bash.exe), but thanks to this idea by @Mizux, I was "inspired" to remove c:\windows\system32\bash.exe.

That was enough to get my job to execute appropriately [3]. Perhaps this doesn't count as disabling WSL, but may be it will help someone else in a similar situation.

---

[1] Within the context of some other code that was "shelling out" to bash.

[2] Thanks to Andrii Hnatushchenko for asking and Tonny for that helpful answer.

[3] Additional thanks to iirekm for articulating this. It nicely crystalized what I seemed to already be trying to do (^^;