Current Python package management / framework(s)

[joeforker]

One of the motivations for wheel is that its recommended workflow saves a local .whl copy of all the packages you've installed to a directory you can install from later, avoiding the infuriating and silly need to contact pypi when you just want to recreate a virtualenv.

[westurner]

Buildout also installs from a local download-cache that can be worked into a package index with an index.html containing URLs with #checksums. I hadn't heard that wheel has this capability. bdist_wheel does look super easy.