On the availability of Cartero for Windows 11 ARM

[danirod]

Hi there!

After making some changes to the build pipelines to accomodate the new GitHub runners powered by Windows 11 ARM, it is possible to confirm now that Cartero builds successfully for Windows 11 ARM using MSYS2-CLANGARM64.

Note that Cartero only has been confirmed to build, but this is not the same as confirming that Cartero works. To check for that, one would need to double click the cartero.exe file and check that it starts the main window, a request can be done, saved, loaded... I don't have access to any ARM computer running Windows 11, so I cannot test for that.

If you have an ARM computer running Windows 11, such as one of those new Lenovo computers powered by a Snapdragon processor, and you want to give it a try and send feedback, you totally can. There are two ways to get Cartero for Windows 11 ARM:

1. Get a precompiled version from our build CI. Visit the workflows log for build.yaml, click on any recent workflow run from the list, then scroll down to the Artifacts section and download the artifact whose name ends with windows-arm64. The .zip file contains a portable version of Cartero precompiled for your OS and architecture. Note that these releases are not signed because they are development builds. You will need to bypass the SmartScreen alert window.

2. Compile it by yourself, after reading the compile instructions. To build Cartero, you will need to install MSYS2 and use the CLANGARM64 shell. Install the dependencies through the MSYS package manager and compile the program following the commands. To build cartero.exe, you will need a Rust toolchain using the aarch64-pc-windows-gnullvm target. This target is not available through rustup, and it has to be built from source. My suggestion is to just install rust through the MSYS package manager, because this one is actually precompiled and it's a valid aarch64-pc-windows-gnullvm toolchain.

I am not asking for a thoughtful testing, nor I am asking for volunteers. The day anyone is able to provide a screenshot that shows that running cartero.exe actually works on Windows 11 ARM, I'll start signing and releasing a precompiled version of Cartero for Windows 11 ARM.

There is also a preview version of Windows 11 ARM on Microsoft Azure. Unfortunately, they don't support pay-as-you-go licenses for the ARM version of Windows and I don't have a valid license of Windows 11 to provide when provisioning the machine. The day it becomes easier to provision one of these machines, I'll fully take care of the release process on my own.

[danirod]

Nevermind, it turns out that there is an official ISO for Windows 11 ARM on the Microsoft website, and they run fine on QEMU. It seemed to run fine and I could make some requests, so Cartero 0.2.3 includes official signed artifacts for Windows 11 ARM.