Use tiny11 to build Windows release binaries instead of Windows 10

[kit-ty-kate]

As Windows 10 is being deprecated we should probably investigate using Windows 11 instead. However, Windows 11 is a rather unreasonable operating system to have virtualised in qemu (microsoft account, tpm, …).

Thus i propose to investigate using tiny11 instead, which also should make the build much faster or at least much faster to setup (as far as i understand things like windows defender is already disabled)

[MisterDA]

For my own curiosity, I suppose you're excluding running Docker-for-Windows builds on a Windows host?

[kit-ty-kate]

yes, the release script's goal is to build every single platform on one computer with just one click. We do this by using mac m1 as a base and emulating everything else (using rosetta, docker for mac and qemu), it is quite nice as it is and i'd rather avoid having to think about more physical machines

[dbuenzli]

However, Windows 11 is a rather unreasonable operating system to have virtualised in qemu (microsoft account, tpm, …).

Note that you can bypass these things. Today I managed to run win11 on my macos arm with qemu by following these instructions (though make sure to read my comment at the end of the page).

I also managed to install opam with winget! but sadly I can't create a switch the whole thing seems to believe I'm in x86.

[kit-ty-kate]

I also managed to install opam with winget! but sadly I can't create a switch the whole thing seems to believe I'm in x86.

opam doesn't support Windows arm64 (neither does cygwin nor opam-repository nor OCaml for that matter). This is tracked in #5189

Note that you can bypass these things. Today I managed to run win11 on my macos arm with qemu by following these instructions (though make sure to read my comment at the end of the page).

I'm not trying to run Windows/arm64 but regular old Windows/x86_64. Also i think these instructions reinforce my point: the installation in unreasonable and way too cumbersome for what we do. We have a similar but smaller set of instructions for Windows 10 that i use for the releases but these are already quite painful that i can't imagine having to upgrade it to include all the Windows 11 quirkiness. On top of that i'm hoping for tiny11 to also help with the final file size

[dbuenzli]

Regarding smaller image files I also fell on this which could be interesting though I didn't manage to boot the image so far (not that I tried hard though).