Hosting proxy repositories for publishing common C/C++ dependencies in PyPI

[TonyXiang8787]

Background

The scikit-build-core backend rely on cmake. When building a project, cmake needs to find its dependencies through find_package. scikit-build-core automatically load the path through entry-points."cmake.root" which is defined by a dependent package, see here. But most commonly used C/C++ packages are not published in PyPI. If we develop some Python project depending on those common C/C++ packages, the user has to find a way to install those packages into the build environment.

Proposal

Does it make sense that this GitHub organization hosts proxy repositories for publishing common C/C++ dependencies in PyPI? In this way, the downstream projects can easily put those PyPI dependencies in the build system, and cmake can find relevant package.

Example: boost

Let's take boost as an example. We can host a repository called e.g. libboost-dev in this GitHub organization. The repository should contain some link to the real boost source tree, via download link or submodule. It sets a Python project up with scikit-build-core to build and install the cmake targets into site-packages. It further defines the entry-points like:

[project.entry-points."cmake.root"]
Boost = "libboost_dev.installed_location"

The proxy repository then builds and publishes the wheels into PyPI. And the projects depending on boost can easily put libboost-dev into the list of build requires.

[build-system]
requires = ["scikit-build-core", "libboost-dev"]
build-backend = "scikit_build_core.build"

Why in this organization?

Theoretically anyone (organization) can host such proxy repositories. But given the popularity of scikit-build-core and proximity of the usage, does it make sense that this GitHub organization hosts the commonly used C/C++ packages?