So, @davdunc and I have made progress on the Fedora kiwi descriptions and now we have an initial base to work from: https://pagure.io/fedora-kiwi-descriptions

For the record, I started on this in https://pagure.io/fedora-kiwi-descriptions/pull-request/16

The remaining tasks for this:

• Package up the WSL utilities: https://wslutiliti.es/
• Get a -wsl variant added to fedora-release
• Add a WSL definition to fedora-kiwi-descriptions (in progress)
• Work with releng team to set up somewhere to publish the appx bundle
• Work with website team to have a page or a section somewhere for downloading it

This will need a dedicated Fedora 41 Change document. Please write one up.

Regarding the appx bundle, my understanding of it so far is that it requires you build a Windows executable (by, for example, forking https://github.com/Microsoft/WSL-DistroLauncher) which you then combine with the tarball and some metadata/branding/etc. I know there's things like the Fedora Media Writer that distributes a Windows executable, but presumably it doesn't need to go through Koji or anything like that. Since we'll be building these images via Koji that executable needs to be available somehow. Is that something that could get an exception for including a pre-built binary?

It seems that the big feature is that it'll prompt the user for a username and password when you run wsl --install <some>.appx, which is definitely a nice user experience, but it's not particularly difficult to just have the instructions include that step after running wsl --import <some>.tar.xz.

No, we will need to port it to be built natively on Linux. It is possible, as SUSE has done it by autotoolizing the codebase: https://github.com/openSUSE/WSL-DistroLauncher

They never contributed their fixes upstream, but I also don't think Autotools would have been a reasonable choice here. It would make sense to add a CMakeLists that works on Windows and Linux.