Windows distribution that includes CMake-based binary artifacts pretty please? python wheel support

Dear COLMAP team,

I'm currently trying to help build windows python wheels for pycolmap:

Issue: https://github.com/colmap/pycolmap/issues/34
PR but nothing working yet: https://github.com/colmap/pycolmap/issues/34#issuecomment-1438068144

AFAIK what pycolmap needs to build the wheel include:

CMake
COLMAP headers, Eigen headers
COLMAP DLLs. I'm not sure if it needs compiled dependencies like cgal or CERES

I've run into the following problems though:

There's no release artifact that includes all of the above. Perhaps this could be added?
I tried using vcpkg install colmap both in Github Actions and on a physical Windows Laptop.
- On Github, I had to cancel after 4hrs to save my minutes.
- On my laptop (modern i7 12 vcore), after 4hrs I ran into an Eigen compile bug which I believe is being investigated here: https://github.com/colmap/colmap/pull/1689

Today, the Windows binary GUI release ( https://github.com/colmap/colmap/releases/download/3.8/COLMAP-3.8-windows-no-cuda.zip ) does not include headers, though it appears to include the needed DLLs. I have tried to frankenstein this release with the source release ( https://github.com/pwais/pycolmap/blob/3476bfd8932e94c4d211dbec58ffe794bcdd08bf/.github/workflows/build-new.yml#L111 ) but nothing working just yet.

So, while vcpkg appears to be the preferred way to build COLMAP from source for windows, that also takes a ton of CPU time, and for pycolmap the build could actually be very fast if the right COLMAP binaries were made available.

For the linux colmap release, it's as simple as set up with cmake and then make install will help create a binary release with headers and such. Could we have the same but for Windows?

Any advice would be much appreciated. I don't develop on Windows too much so I'm still learning the area.

colmap / colmap

Windows distribution that includes CMake-based binary artifacts pretty please? python wheel support #1810