GH-44421: [Python] Add configuration for building & testing free-threaded wheels on Windows

[lysnikolaou]

Rationale for this change

There's no blockers anymore for building Windows wheels for the free-threaded build, so this PR adds the necessary configuration to do that.

What changes are included in this PR?

• Add jobs to build free-threaded wheels on Windows
• Move VCPKG-related stuff to a reusable base job

Are these changes tested?

No tests required.

Are there any user-facing changes?

No.

• GitHub Issue: [Python][Packaging] Enable free-threaded wheels on Windows #44421

[github-actions]

⚠️ GitHub issue #44421 has been automatically assigned in GitHub to PR creator.

[lysnikolaou]

If someone could trigger the new jobs, that'd be really helpful!

[raulcd]

@github-actions crossbow submit -g wheel-windows-*

[github-actions]

Invalid group(s) {'wheel-windows-*'}. Must be one of {'wheel', 'cuda', 'example-cpp', 'linux', 'homebrew', 'fuzz', 'integration', 'cpp', 'example-python', 'nightly-release', 'verify-rc-source-linux', 'c-glib', 'example', 'python', 'nightly', 'conan', 'verify-rc-wheels', 'packaging', 'r', 'verify-rc-source', 'verify-rc', 'nightly-packaging', 'nightly-tests', 'vcpkg', 'java', 'linux-arm64', 'verify-rc-binaries', 'conda', 'test', 'verify-rc-source-macos', 'ruby', 'verify-rc-jars', 'linux-amd64'}
The Archery job run can be found at: https://github.com/apache/arrow/actions/runs/12047528593

[raulcd]

@github-actions crossbow submit wheel-windows-*

[github-actions]

Revision: 78d8f9e

Submitted crossbow builds: ursacomputing/crossbow @ actions-86ba33e477

Task	Status
wheel-windows-cp310-cp310-amd64
wheel-windows-cp311-cp311-amd64
wheel-windows-cp312-cp312-amd64
wheel-windows-cp313-cp313-amd64
wheel-windows-cp313-cp313t-amd64
wheel-windows-cp39-cp39-amd64

[raulcd]

Thanks for the PR, I triggered the CI jobs

[lysnikolaou]

Unfortunately, while the free-threaded wheel is built correctly, py -3.13t -c "import pyarrow" fails. No error shown. Does anyone know how I could inspect stderr to see why this fails?

[lysnikolaou]

Also, the failure on 3.9 is that py cannot be found when running py -%PYTHON% setup.py bdist_wheel || exit /B 1, which seems odd.

[raulcd]

Unfortunately, while the free-threaded wheel is built correctly, py -3.13t -c "import pyarrow" fails. No error shown. Does anyone know how I could inspect stderr to see why this fails?

I haven't tested and I am unsure if this works but maybe we can try this (https://stackoverflow.com/a/21912169):
py -3.13t -c "import pyarrow" || echo ERROR && exit /B 1 instead of py -3.13t -c "import pyarrow" || exit /B 1

[lysnikolaou]

The Windows failure is probably related to pypa/setuptools#4662 and should be fixed in the next setuptools release.

[pitrou]

The Windows failure is probably related to pypa/setuptools#4662 and should be fixed in the next setuptools release.

Hmm, that one should be fixed in CPython AFAIU: python/cpython#111650

[pitrou]

Ah, scratch that, the rationale is actually here:
https://github.com/pypa/distutils/pull/310/files

[pitrou]

Unfortunately, while the free-threaded wheel is built correctly, py -3.13t -c "import pyarrow" fails. No error shown. Does anyone know how I could inspect stderr to see why this fails?

Well, stderr should already be shown by default, so it's weird that nothing gets displayed.