Complicated wheel repairs with Windows.

[bdice]

Hi! I created this post to describe a weird use case with C++ extensions and wheel repairs on Windows and how I'm hoping to solve it. Seemed like a good use of Discussions, because it's neither an issue nor a PR (yet?).

I maintain freud and would like to use cibuildwheel with scikit-build on Windows. I expect to need some kind of repair command for Windows as described in #459, and I plan to try delvewheel. Unfortunately delvewheel may not yet support my use case, so I may have to start with PRs to that package or a workaround specific to my package that prevents the need for repairs. Some possible workarounds are described in this blog post.

I have several Cython extensions linking to a pure C++ library (libfreud) that is built by scikit-build/CMake AND an external C++ library dependency, TBB. libfreud also links to TBB, so there are lots of repairs needed. The auditwheel tool recently added support for repairing dependencies that are not built Python extensions, like what I have with libfreud. I may follow up with an issue and suggest doc improvements once I find a good solution for this.