Develop a GRASS Conda package that will be useable across multiple OS platforms

[cmbarton]

A common request of the GRASS user community and one of the planned activities of the NSF POSE grant is to make it possible to install GRASS as a package in the widely used Anaconda environment for Python. Some initial discussions, as well as test code have been started here.

I'm opening this issue on the GRASS repository to broaden the discussion of this effort to the entire GRASS community and encourage those familiar with GRASS, Python, and Conda to contribute to the effort.

[gregorywaynepower]

Adding GRASS to conda-forge would make incorporating GRASS into Python-based workflows so much easier. Even though conda isn't perfect, I've started to see more folks use pixi in their geospatial workflows.

[cmbarton]

There are people in Huidae Cho's lab working on this.

[nilason]

Somewhat (for the moment) stalled work on this is started with conda-forge/staged-recipes#27248.

[nilason]

(Perhaps the single most important factor which complicates this is that GRASS doesn’t comply with FHS #3661).

[petrasovaa]

Notifying @HuidaeCho if he wants to comment

[HuidaeCho]

I do have a graduate student, @KandelN, working on the POSE project. He's learning GRASS GIS and has tried one good first issue (#4947). I still need to review his previous Conda work for Linux. It didn't work last time.

BTW, as part of this effort, @Mahesh1998 has done a great job and was able to successfully compile GRASS using CMake and MSVC on Windows. For some reason, we didn't get stdout and stderr (no outputs?), so I'll look into it soon.