On 1/28/25 12:59 AM, Robin Candau wrote:
Hi everyone,
I'm writing this mail to collect thoughts and interests about providing an official Arch Linux image for WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) [1].
Hey, After only a few days, this proposal has generated quite some attractions with a majority of positive feedback, both from users and staff! Interest for an official Arch Linux WSL image is *nearly* unanimous so far (at the moment, this thread only received one answer expressing no interest) and multiple people shared that they are already using WSL (with or without Arch Linux as a distribution) which gives legitimacy to this proposal. I'm also very happy to see that some staff members agreed on supporting such an image and that multiple people (including staff members and users from the community) offered their help, both regarding maintenance and support! :D I guess the one major remaining question is the level of support we would provide for this. As I said multiple time in this thread (and as approved by multiple staff members as well), I think it's totally reasonable to provide a limited / best effort support and consider WSL related bug reports a low priority for now. As suggested by the answers I got so far, I eventually expect some users from the community to jump in regarding support / bug reports handling (if anyone else from the community would eventually be up to help with support, please reach out)! Regarding maintenance and distribution, I took the time to set up a GitLab repository [1] (under my own namespace, please read the DISCLAIMER at the top of the README) to tinker a bit with automated image building & publishing and I think it's already pretty close from a first iteration goal: The repository contains every scripts and files needed to create a WSL image for Arch Linux (built from scratch, it's not based on the Docker rootfs tarball anymore). Images are automatically built monthly and published in the package registry via GitLab CI schedule [2]. The pipeline also automatically creates a tag and a related release containing the image (and a checksum file) as release assets [3]. The repository also contains documentation on how to build your own image [4], which is pretty straightforward. The image provides out of the box `systemd` support, a first setup script (currently mostly showing a bit of documentation to the user at the first run), a default shortcut icon and a default terminal profile. It can already be installed & used with WSL2, as described in the (semi) manual installation instructions [5] (still pretty straightforward). The automated install method [6] is documented but not yet functional. This requires opening a pull request to add the Arch Linux image to the official list of distributions supported by WSL out of the box [7], which I intend to do if this proposal get through. Note that it would require opening pull requests to the microsoft/WSL repository regularly to update the image URL and checksum (e.g. once a month if we follow the current release schedule) but that can be automated, as it's currently done for our Docker image. After a second thought, I think it would be beneficial to have a separate / dedicated repository for WSL images. Indeed, while the overall development and building workflow is pretty close to the one used for Docker images, I don't think WSL images would fit well in the "archlinux-docker" repository [8]. The "arch-boxes" repository [9] could have been a great fit but the development and building workflow differs quite a lot. Keeping WSL images in a separate repository would also bring the benefit to keep every WSL related issues / bug reports in a dedicated space, so people that have no interest in them won't came accros them :) Sorry once again for the long read 0:) All and all, I'm pretty happy about the overall feedback on that proposal and the work done on my "PoC" repository so far! Let's give a bit more time for people to react though. It's only been a few days and a lot of people are currently busy with FOSDEM preparation (by the way, a lot of us will be there, including myself. Come say "hi"!). [1] https://gitlab.archlinux.org/antiz/archlinux-wsl [2] https://gitlab.archlinux.org/antiz/archlinux-wsl/-/pipeline_schedules [3] https://gitlab.archlinux.org/antiz/archlinux-wsl/-/releases/2025.01.29 [4] https://gitlab.archlinux.org/antiz/archlinux-wsl#building-your-own-image [5] https://gitlab.archlinux.org/antiz/archlinux-wsl#manual-install [6] https://gitlab.archlinux.org/antiz/archlinux-wsl#automated-install [7] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/build-custom-distro#adding-you... [8] https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/archlinux-docker [9] https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/arch-boxes -- Regards, Robin Candau / Antiz