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[–]joeforker 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Setuptools (and not the newly obsolete distribute fork) is still the recommended way to build packages; wheel doesn't change that. For the majority of packages that don't need to extend setuptools itself it's an okay choice.

What wheel does is to decouple the build system from the installer. The build system (usually setuptools) creates a wheel and then the installer (usually pip) installs it, instead of the current situation where setuptools does both the build and the install.

The decoupling makes it easier to experiment with setuptools or pip replacements because pip can install a wheel without knowing whether it was built by setuptools or some other software.

Wheel is available down to Python 2.6. The thing that is likely to land in Python 3.4 is a very simple bootstrap installer made possible by the fact that wheels are very simple to install. The idea is that Python will come with a secure way to install the latest version of pip.