The Codeberg Packages feed for the repo still only has Linux glibc x86_64 wheels, but with all three CI systems up and running, I hope to expand that to publish dev builds for a much wider variety of systems.

That then means that things like icy_you, charminder, and pydofo, all of which provide static wrappers commonly used native libraries with little to no runtime requirements, should soon be available to use cross-platform.

Of those icy_you is perhaps the least exciting for Arcalibre but of the most interest more generally. Taking runtime dependencies on ICU4C is really difficult to do cross-platform. Even commercial frameworks like .NET struggle with ABI breakages in libicu versions, let alone the difficulties faced by volunteer or NPO-run projects.

By contrast, icy_you uses PyO3, Maturin, and ICU4X to statically build ICU into the Python extension module. Less efficient, so there's a tradeoff, but still.

Thanks to PEP 517, PDM, and build backends like maturin and scikit_build_core_conan, all of the above works cross-platform with *exactly* the same PDM commands.

Just run `pdm builld -p $wheel_name`. That's (almost) it. maturin will download Rust for you, scikit_build_core_conan has PyPI dependencies on cmake and conan... all you need outside your normal Python tooling is to have a C/C++ compiler for your system installed and on PATH.

These packages need a lot of work before they can be release ready, but the infrastructure for building, testing, and publishing them cross-platform is getting very close.

Thanks to feedback from yesterday's #PyCascades sprints, we also have a lot more insight into what barriers new contributors hit, and have some ideas on how to improve docs to help.

This is finally starting to come together, and I love it.