Migrate all Python builds from scikit-build to scikit-build-core about build-planning

[vyasr]

I chose not to include cugraph-ops in this work because that package uses nanobind instead of Cython for its bindings, so it's not sensitive to rapids-cython changes. I also don't know much about its nanobind usage, and it looks like they do something bespoke with setting the CMake install directory. I'd rather leave that one to the devs to manage the transition since it doesn't impact rapids-cython at all.

[vyasr]

Good catches @jameslamb! Let me work through these. As far as build options we've just been removing the build options everywhere, so I'll do that, and hopefully the configure options are mostly fixed already since those need to be right for everything to work correctly.

[vyasr]

These are the remaining issues in repos that have made the scikit-build-core transition. We can close this issue once the following PRs are merged:

• rapidsai/cuml#5714
• https://github.com/rapidsai/cuopt/pull/1615
• rapidsai/cudf#14746

[jameslamb]

I'm +1 on this.

For reference, the README has a thorough and direct list of differences between scikit-build and scikit-build-core: https://github.com/scikit-build/scikit-build-core

[bdice]

@vyasr Would it be possible to migrate cugraph-ops as well? It seems that repo was missed. It'd be good to handle this while it's fresh on our minds.

https://github.com/rapidsai/cugraph-ops/blob/96a388691c8d42a9f3b7a56bf6f29d24d8ffe166/pylibcugraphops/pyproject.toml#L20
https://github.com/rapidsai/cugraph-ops/blob/96a388691c8d42a9f3b7a56bf6f29d24d8ffe166/docker/Dockerfile#L63

[bdice]

Also, this might not need migrated, but rapids-cmake also relies on scikit-build as a test dependency (and cython>=0.29,<0.30 which might be possible to clean up at the same time).

https://github.com/rapidsai/rapids-cmake/blob/208b0d1240caaca41603fccc10b7ac44aea47477/dependencies.yaml#L146

[vyasr]

Regarding rapids-cmake, I'm pretty sure that dependency is superfluous and can be removed altogether. We never actually launch builds via Python in rapids-cmake. Removed that dependency in rapidsai/rapids-cmake#512.

[jameslamb]

I think there's one more block of work that should be done as part of this.

There are some projects with configuration in environment variables that scikit-build recognized but scikit-build-core does not. From scikit-build-core's migration guide (docs)

The SKBUILD_CONFIGURE_OPTIONS environment variable is now named SKBUILD_CMAKE_ARGS for consistency.

The SKBUILD_BUILD_OPTIONS environment variable is not supported. Some specific features are accessible using alternative variables. In particular, use CMAKE_BUILD_PARALLEL_LEVEL or SKBUILD_CMAKE_VERBOSE to control build parallelism or CMake verbosity directly.

So I see 3 small pieces of additional work:

• convert all uses of SKBUILD_CONFIGURE_OPTIONS to SKBUILD_CMAKE_ARGS
• convert stuff like SKBUILD_BUILD_OPTIONS="-j4" to CMAKE_BUILD_PARALLEL_LEVEL=4
• convert stuff like SKBUILD_BUILD_OPTIONS="-v" to SKBUILD_CMAKE_VERBOSE="true"

For all projects that have recently cut over to scikit-build-core.

---

I didn't find a ton of these from GitHub search (e.g. this link), but there are a few.

For example, cuml cut over to scikit-build-core (rapidsai/cuml#5693) but is still using SKBUILD_BUILD_OPTIONS to control parallelism (code link).

[vyasr]

Closing this now. All the associated work has been merged.