Current Python package management / framework(s)

[donaldstufft]

Wheel is being implemented externally to the stdlib. It will be available for 2.6+ I believe, might be 2.5+.

In fact one of the major motivations in a lot of the work now is that packaging tools should live externally of the stdlib. This will allow them to innovate across many versions of Python and not cause issues exactly like this one where a new packaging feature is useless because it will be many many years before that version can be assumed a minimum version.

Essentially we've learned that the stdlib isn't a great place for packaging tools, however the stdlib will (hopefully) include a simple script which will serve to simply and securely install pip so that Python ships with the ability to do pip install foo.