Include headers to support binary linking?

First off, thanks for this project, it saves a ton of time and I'm really happy that it exists. It makes it a lot easier to get OpenCV installed for the high school students I work with.

I'd like to take a C++ library that uses OpenCV, wrap it with cython, and link it to the OpenCV bits in the binary provided by the installed wheel. This would allow users to just install the wheel of the other library + the opencv-python wheel, as opposed to having to compile their own version.

Has anyone tried this yet? A cursory look at the linux .so files indicate that it exports all of the normal OpenCV symbols, so in theory if you just include the right headers and link to it then it should just work (though maybe not for Windows)... I think that one would add an additional cv2 module (cv2.distutils?) that could provide a list of includes/libraries, similar to how numpy works.

If there's no opposition to this, I might try this out in a week or three to see how it goes.

The issue names no repository files or tests. Start by inspecting the Linux .so contents in an installed wheel and comparing the proposed cv2.distutils interface with NumPy's include and library discovery; a finished solution would need an agreed scope and reproducible support for consumers linking against the wheel, including the Windows question.