`delvewheel` as default for windows repair command

[nilsnolde]

I'd like to warm up this old issue: #459. it's been 5 years now and I guess delvewheel did prove itself enough?

At least I've been using it since many years now and while there's some options one doesn't need to be aware of with auditwheel & delocate, I bet the usual default of delvewheel repair -w {dest_dir} {wheel} is all one needs in the vast majority of cases (indeed I do need more options for my projects).

[joerick]

This was briefly discussed in the lead-up to v3.0. @adang1345 chimed in-

#2047 (comment)

Regarding adding a delvewheel default repair command, I'm not sure. I have noticed that current cibuildwheel users frequently use the --add-path option to tell delvewheel where to find DLL dependencies during the repair process, and the path used is different for each project. It may be better to require the user to manually set the repair command and just put an example command in the documentation such as delvewheel repair -w {dest_dir} {wheel}.

That was a busy time and we didn't discuss further.

I'm still interested in adding it to be honest. If delvewheel errors out when it can't find external libs, that seems better than packagers shipping wheels with external dependencies that's only discovered when a user tries to install it.

However, if there are false positives (e.g. bundling system libraries that basically everyone has, or erroring when it can't find a library that doesn't need to be bundled) that would be a reason not to do it. And it's certainly a breaking change, so we'd only want to do it before v4.0 if we were confident disruption would be low.

[nilsnolde]

Well, dev seems to be messy on Windows. In my experience setting a path for delvewheel is only necessary when one doesn't put the DLLs into a trivially known location, or forgets to add those dirs to PATH. More of a win issue in general I feel like, but probably a bit of a gotcha for linux/osx users of cibuildwheel. Not sure any future win repair package would be able to do a better job of it.