Scikit-build Community Meeting #3: 2023-01-20

[jcfr]

Agenda

• Review slides from @henryiii.
  • Scikit-build-core (Awkward Array v2, next plans)
  • Windows ARM support
  • Scikit-build classic
  • Design questions
• Round table

Attending

• Henry Schreiner (Princeton)
• Matt McCormick (Kitware)
• Ralf Gommers (Quansight Labs)
• Jean-Christophe Fillion-Robin (Kitware)

Discussion

New version of build, packaging bootstrapping discussion

• flit-core as a build system for bootstrapping
• flit-core -> build -> installer
• remove setuptools circular dependency
  • Self-contained (only dependency is tomli, vendored, and available in newer CPython)
• wheel moving to flit-core?
• packaging library not in Python due to needing to ship updates for packaging
• meson-python dependencies kept very minimal
  • meson (no dependencies)
• .pyz file
  • see https://docs.python.org/3/library/zipapp.html
  • zip files containing Python code, which can be executed directly by the Python interpreter
  • Linux distributions want to build from "original" sources
    • installer helps the story to build wheels from source
• scikit-build-core deps
  • See https://github.com/scikit-build/scikit-build-core/blob/main/pyproject.toml
  • hatchling -- could be swapped out if needed at some time in the future
  • vcs versioning -- torn about keeping (scikit-build too)
  • importlib-resources older versions
  • other basic backport packages for older versions of Python
  • PEP 517 support: pyproject-metadata, distlib (wheel support), pathspec (.gitignore support)

Slides review notes

• Presentation

• Awkward Array - use pyodide build?

  • https://awkward-array.org/doc/main/getting-started/try-awkward-array.html
  • https://pyodide.org/en/stable/index.html
  • https://pyodide.org/en/stable/usage/wasm-constraints.html

• Primary need for putting Windows / ARM on the map: ninja binaries

• Stable ABI

  • Python 3.11 for buffer interface
  • Pybind11 will likely need Python 3.12 due to metaclass support
  • NumPy, SciPy etc. difficult due to limited Cython support
  • HPy may be a good practical path. See https://hpyproject.org/

• What would improve Python development overall: automated virtual environment generation when needed

Distributing shared libraries

• About shipping non-Python shared libraries and linking against them: Linking against libraries from meson on Windows mesonbuild/meson-python#265. Could probably use a shared approach between scikit-build and meson-python

Discussion for next time

Packaging-native documentation

• E.g. dealing with shared libraries
• cross-compilation