Earlier today we merged the existing wheel branch into mainline pip. This adds opt-in wheel install support (built into pip, "pip install --use-wheel ...") and the convenient "pip wheel ..." command for creating the wheels you need. "pip wheel ..." uses the wheel reference implementation ("pip install wheel") to compile a dependency tree as .whl archives. Used together with "pip install --use-wheel ..." it provides a powerful way to speed up repeated installs and reap other good packaging benefits. I've been using this code in production for months and it works well. I am now a pip maintainer. We are committed to offering excellent wheel support in pip including a good way to produce and consume the format. In the future we will likely refactor the code to offer the same features with more distlib and less setuptools but this change will be mostly transparent to the end user. Once everyone is comfortable with the format we will move towards installing wheels by default when they are available instead of requiring the --use-wheel flag. Enjoy! Please share your experiences with the new feature. The most common issue is that you must install distribute >= 0.6.34 for everything to work well. Daniel Holth