Drop support for Windows static builds

[indygreg]

I started this project in support of PyOxidizer. And one of the reasons I started PyOxidizer was to see if it was possible to achieve single file executable Python applications.

While I arguably succeeded in accomplishing that single file executable goal, it came at a prohibitively high cost of being effectively unusable in many situations. The further I diverged from common Python practices, the more difficult it was to get PyOxidizer to work.

The Windows static builds in this project are an artifact from trying to achieve the original goals of PyOxidizer.

With the benefit of hindsight, the static Windows builds are borderline unusable. They have many known (and likely several unknown) quirks. I don't believe they are providing much value.

Over the history of this project, here are download statistics for the Windows static builds:

Build	Install Only Download Count
i686-pc-windows-msvc-static	668
i686-pc-windows-msvc-shared	1039
x86_64-pc-windows-msvc-static	12792
x86_64-pc-windows-msvc-shared	914998

Build	Full Archive Download Count
i686-pc-windows-msvc-static-noopt	85226
i686-pc-windows-msvc-shared-pgo	91420
x86_64-pc-windows-msvc-static-noopt	83895
x86_64-pc-windows-msvc-shared-pgo	135683

I reckon PyOxidizer is the biggest driver of the full archive downloads. And there we see that the static archives are relatively popular. But probably because PyOxidizer defaulted to using the Windows static builds in various releases.

The install only archives - which customers organically adopt - tells a different story. Here, shared is getting 71x the downloads as static.

The static Windows builds constitute a non-trivial amount of complexity to continue maintaining. The distributions break tons of assumptions made by Python projects in the wild. I think they are more trouble to support than they are worth.

So I'm proposing we stop supporting the Windows static builds.

Please leave a comment with objections if you have any.

In the absence of compelling arguments to preserve them, the Windows static distributions will be removed in a future release.

[charliermarsh]

I'll give this a shot.