Checklist

• I added a descriptive title
• I searched for other feature requests and couldn't find a duplicate (including also the type-feature tag)
• I confirmed that it's not related to another project (see the above section)

What is the idea?

Hi, Linaro is currently working with Microsoft to enable a lot of open source projects to run on Windows on Arm.

We are currently investigating if conda could be easily enabled for this new architecture.
The main blocking point today is the lack of "free" Windows on Arm machines in CI systems.
Azure started deploying Arm server, but this is not a free solution.

Thus, we are targetting cross compilation for now, and we would like to experiment with it, before offering any official support.

Why is this needed

Microsoft is investing a lot of effort in this new architecture, and the numbers of users is growing steadily.

Since conda allows to distribute a lot of software, it is a great way to support a lot of projects through it.

What should happen?

So far, I'm trying to build a package for this new architecture on a custom channel at anaconda.org.

I added a conda_build_config.yaml:

target_platform:
  - win-arm64

I started with a recipe without any dependencies.
conda-build insists on finding ...\conda-bld\win-arm64\repodata.json, which, of course, is not available at the time.
I managed to bypass this by copying it (locally) from win-64 arch.

Is a support needed on anaconda side to make it work?

After that, I tried to compile a C package. Alas, due to the absence of repodata.json, no compiler package can be found.
Is there a way to define it locally, so I can at least try to build a few packages?

I didn't manage to find useful documentation on porting to new architecture, which, I can understand, is not very frequent.
Where is the best place to get information on this?

Thanks,
Pierrick

Additional Context

No response