How can I ship an icon (or font) in a fragment in a MSIX?

[davidanthoff]

I am now shipping a profile fragment in the Julia MSIX Windows Store installer here. It works great! I still have one question, though: how can I ship an icon in my fragment that will be used? I tried putting an icon file next to the fragment json and then just adding "icon": "julia.ico" to the fragment, but with that it complained that it couldn't find the icon.

I think I need some way to specify a relative path here that is relative to the fragment file location, right? Is there some way to do that?

[skyline75489]

Check out the blog which introduces the fragments integration of Pengwin WSL. They managed to bring both icon & background image alongside the installation.

[skyline75489]

The exact code is this one, I think.

[davidanthoff]

Hm, interesting... That does seem to work, but it also seems a bit hacky? What they are doing is copying the icon file at startup of the program into the local app data location (which I think means it will only work once everything has run once), and then they have semi hard coded the path to where MSIX is storing local app data in the fragment for the icon path. That latter step is probably not a good idea? Isn't that file location considered an implementation detail of MSIX? Essentially they are using a special path to reach into the container of their app, which seems not in the spirit of MSIX.

Is there maybe a way to do the same thing in a less involved way? Couldn't the terminal just be able to interpret relative paths from the fragment?

[skyline75489]

Yeah .. I wouldn't say "semi hard coded" path is a good idea or an elegant solution, either. I'll leave this to @DHowett and @PankajBhojwani

[WSLUser]

You know this also raises the question for me of whether you can import a fragment yourself as a user. Say you import the rootfs of Pengwin and install it through the wsl --import option. You won't be able to obtain the fragment through the Store as a result of this method. Perhaps I should raise an issue for this if there isn't one already. This would also affect Julia and any other third party application, especially those that aren't available in the Store.

[mpela81]

I guess #6747 would be helpful (but probably not easy to implement), you could embed the icon into the json itself without worrying about file paths

[DHowett]

This is an excellent question. I somewhat wonder if icon resource paths like ms-appx://My.PackageName_myPublisher/Public/XYZ work...

If they do: cool, the first free thing we've gotten from the app platform.

If not: I think we will want to add manual support for something like it.

[davidanthoff]

I'm trying that now!