Feature request: use Wine-in-Docker to build Windows wheels from Linux hosts

[cgranade]

Description

Outside of GitHub services, standing up Windows-platform runners in CI is a bit more tricky and expensive as compared to GitHub-subsidized runners. In particular, for users running cibuildwheel locally or on Woodpecker, having access to Windows runners may be prohibitive.

In principle, it should be possible to run cibuildwheel from a Wine prefix, such that a Linux host can produce Windows-platform wheels by running Wine in a Docker environment. I put together a small proof-of-concept at https://codeberg.org/rereading/pyreading/src/branch/cgranade/wine-env/ci-environment/wine, which gets as far as using Wine-in-Docker to provision uv and PDM, populating development environments, and calling out to cibuildwheel. That build in turn is able to download and run Cargo-in-Wine, but fails when trying to call link.exe, as the Windows SDK build tools are missing in that environment. The winetricks project has an explicit recipe for installing these build tools, but I was unable to get that recipe working without a virtual framebuffer for Wine to draw progress dialog boxes to — still, even with that caveat, it's enough progress to suggest to me that such an approach might be workable.

I definitely recognize this is a bit of a wild feature request, and quite possibly not in line with PyPA's goals here. However, I wanted to ask anyway rather than making an assumption, as this would be a wonderful tool for helping to build Python wheels without depending on GitHub services. Thanks for an awesome project, and for taking the time to read this (admittedly unhinged) feature request! ♥

Build log

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CI config

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