Build wheels in CI and publish them

[bnavigator]

We don't publish wheels because we don't know how to build them.

I've tried and failed to build wheels for Windows before; if I recall correctly one basically has to bundle a BLAS&LAPACK library in the wheel, and I couldn't figure out how to do it.

Originally posted by @roryyorke in #155 (comment)

[bnavigator]

Scikit-build recently has teamed up with cibuildwheel. Maybe this is a viable approach to get wheels which work in a standard pip install.

[bnavigator]

cibuildwheel still has no auditwheel equivalent for Windows.

[sdahdah]

I don't know if this is helpful info for you, but cibuildwheel now seems to recommend delvewheel as a Windows equivalent for auditwheel. They show an example of how to use it in their documentation here.

[roryyorke]

For an overview of the problems involved, there's this, published late 2022: https://pypackaging-native.github.io/ . See especially https://pypackaging-native.github.io/key-issues/native-dependencies/blas_openmp/

That references this https://web.archive.org/web/20210616203153/https://pav.iki.fi/blog/2017-10-08/pywingfortran.html (archive link, original down). It looks like this needs numpy.distutils, but I don't think scikit-build uses that (maybe it does?). Maybe scikit-build also has the statically-link-gfortran-runtime magic

I had another go at this over the Christmas break and go nowhere, though my effort was admittedly half-hearted.

[bnavigator]

Nice find!

numpy.distutils is deprecated and will be removed in a future version. scikit-build is in the middle of a major overhaul.

SciPy moved to Meson recently. Maybe an option for us is to switch from scikit-build/CMake to meson-python as well and build wheels with cibuildwheel as SciPy does.

• https://github.com/scipy/scipy/blob/main/tools/wheels/cibw_before_build_win.sh
• https://github.com/scipy/scipy/blob/main/tools/wheels/repair_windows.sh