Add Windows installers

[travishathaway]

Maintenance type

Release

Description

Currently, there are only standalone installers available for Linux and macOS. To make it easier for Windows users, I'd like to add an installer that they will be able to copy and paste into their PowerShell terminal.

One example of this is the way pixi enables this via this command:

powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -c "irm -useb https://pixi.sh/install.ps1 | iex"

Motivation

Better serving users on the world's most popular operation system.

Scope and affected areas

No response

Task checklist

• Update release.yml to include Windows installer similar to our current ones
• Add Windows installer build to smoke.yml
• Update documentation front page and getting started guide to reference this new installer

Urgency

Medium — should be done this cycle

Additional context

Use the pixi install.ps1 as a reference implementation for this implementation.

[travishathaway]

I ran into a pretty big stumbling block for this today. Windows support for PostGIS on conda-forge is currently non-existent. This means that we can't run automated tests in CI. I was trying to add PostGIS support, but eventually gave up because compiling PostGIS with the MSVC compilers on conda-forge meant hacking a lot of things together.

Now, I'm going to try to maintain my own PostgreSQL build on gis-forge that will use msys as the build system. This should allow PostGIS to be built there. We'll see how that works out!