Windows executable

[GiovanniBussi]

@tonigi I move the discussion here since I think this is partly independent from the conda-forge thing.

It might be interesting to be able to provide at least a plumed driver executable for Windows.

• Here Toni managed to have a working conda-forge package
• This is another repository by Toni to setup tests for the resulting executable.

[GiovanniBussi]

@tonigi since I understood that the slowest part is building with conda, I checked how long does it take to build with mingw (see this repository).

• Build takes ~ 7 minutes on GitHub actions
• I have no idea if the resulting executable is working, you can find it at the end of this page this page.
• I added you as a collaborator in the repository above, I imagine this is sufficient to download the artifact. Otherwise I can send you the file.

What do you think?

[tonigi]

Here is yet another repository where i build+regtest the conda package with github actions. Conda-build is ~30 min. The advantage is that it may happen at every commit on par with the other archs.

The setup is very similar to Appveyor's . The only advantage of Appveyor is that it allows interactive checks.

On the other hand, I wouldn't bother with wine... Mingw works quite nice already. Regarding stand-alone vs conda, I have no strong opinion. Some people seem to expect the latter, but they should also know that functionalities are quite reduced in any case.

Cross-builds, as you have seen, are very fast and in my experience "it just works". It's how I used to build the exe's recommended for VMD's PLUMED-GUI.