Better support for PEP-517 build backends

[dalcinl]

I have a project that builds CUDA code into shared library. This shared library is then loaded with ctypes to be used from pure-Python code passing buffers from CuPy arrays.

My pyproject.toml uses the Cmake-based scikit-build-core build system, configured as per the nowadays widespread mechanism of PEP-517.

Ideally, I would like to have something minimal like:

[build-system]
build-backend = "scikit_build_core.build"
requires = [
  "cuda-toolkit[cccl,nvcc,cudart]==13.*",
  "scikit-build-core",
]

to configure the build-system dependencies and a companion CMakeLists.txt for CMake to handle the build of the shared library.

Unfortunately, this does not work out of the box. The reason is simple: CMake knows nothing about the install layout of the various NVIDIA/CUDA packages withing a virtual environment, thus it fails to find the nvcc compiler located in <venv>/lib/pythonX.Y/site-packages/nvidia/cuZZ/bin/nvcc.

I managed to find a workaround that could become a sensible feature addition. All what would be needed is to install a *.pth file in the virtual environment. This file would look for NVCC and then prepend <bindir> to the process $PATH.
A proof of concept is available here: https://github.com/dalcinl/skbuild-cuda-demo/

Please not this line https://github.com/dalcinl/skbuild-cuda-demo/blob/master/pyproject.toml#L18. In there, I'm adding a local project cuda-activate as an additional build dependency. This project is the one that manages to eventually install a *.pth file.

After cloning the git repo, you can check that everything works smoothly using uv (otherwise, do export PROJECT_ROOT=$PWD first):

$ uv run --group test pytest

If you comment out this line https://github.com/dalcinl/skbuild-cuda-demo/blob/master/pyproject.toml#L18 then things will no longer work, CMake will not find nvcc.

Long story short: I would like to propose an opt-in and backward compatible mechanism (via a new small package) such PEP-517 build backends would find NVIDIA tools in automatically. One possible API for this opt-in mechanism could be

[build-system]
requires = [
  "cuda-toolkit[build-system]",
  ...
]

where the extra build-system (or any name you see fit) would bring in an extra package that install *.pth file in charge of extending $PATH (i.e os.environ["PATH"]).
A prototype for this new package is what I wrote for my demo: https://github.com/dalcinl/skbuild-cuda-demo/tree/master/src/cuda-activate which could be of course renamed, e.g cuda-build-system for consistency with the extras name I proposed avobe.

However, there are a few things that I do not like in the code, like depending on finding nvcc vs possibly other tools. I do not know the exact layout and contents of all the new packages in the cuda-python ecosystem, therefore would need some advice here.

Thoughts?