make an installation script for Windows

[mwermelinger]

The Unix installation script needs to be translated to a Windows batch file that does the same as described at the start of createnv.sh, except that it doesn't need to detect the Unix shell.

It's unclear to me if the batch script needs to run under PowerShell: according to https://docs.python.org/3.10/library/venv.html it seems so, but PowerShell isn't mentioned in https://packaging.python.org/en/latest/tutorials/installing-packages.

As I'm not a Windows user, this script has to be written and tried out by someone else.

[mwermelinger]

It's probably best to require Windows users to install WSL, so that everyone uses a Unix environment , which greatly simplifies software installation and instructions, and helping students on forums. Furthermore, with WSL, everyone can have pytype and check method calls in the TMAs.

There seem to be occasional issues with internet access from WSL, so it should be tested with external links from the M269 book.

[mwermelinger]

One needs to figure out how Windows users should install Python 3.10, so that the creation of the virtual environment under WSL works. There seems to be 3 possibilities to install Python

• in WSL, install from the source code downloaded from python.org
• in WSL, use the Ubuntu package manager
• download the 64-bit Windows installer (or 32-bit installer if using that version of Windows 10) from python.org and run it

The third option is best and easiest if python3.10 in the script can invoke the Windows installation, otherwise it probably will have to be the second option.