Cleanup wheels from useless artefacts

[SylvainCorlay]

Is it possible to exclude items which are in the cmake install manifest from the wheel?

As it turns out, we were able to do a fully static build of everything in our scikit-build wheel to avoid relocation issues, but te resulting wheel includes the .a, as well as the cmake config files and other artefacts from the dependencies. Since all we produce is an executable, we could completely remove all of that...

[jcfr]

Thanks for the report.

Since scikit-build performs the install of the project, I suspect they are install rules associated with static libraries.

To address this, I am thinking of few possible approaches:

• (1) provide a scikit-build specific option allowing to choose components to install. We should then be able to only install these. I think we could achieve this by improving the _parse_manifest function used here
• (1a) If scikit-build detects they are components associated with install rules, it could automatically select Runtime and RuntimeLibraries components by building up on what would be implemented in (1)... but I fear this could break existing packages.
• (2) Systematically filter out some of the artifacts based on file extension.

I think (1) would be a reasonable trad-off.

[SylvainCorlay]

I think that (1) and then (1a) at a later stage are probably the best way to do so.

If there was a hook to filter items in the manifest manually, we would certainly do that for now.