Related #3503 (closed)
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Pre-requisite: images!205 (merged)
This is a refined backport of !6989 (merged), which was later reverted in !7019 (merged) due to a CI issue on windows.
In addition, this MR also backports changes from !7059 (merged) .
Finally, there are a couple of 9.16-specific commits which address the windows CI issue (3ebf02d5) and a benign ./configure issue (bee2f7c6).