On 17 July 2013 17:59, Brett Cannon <brett@python.org> wrote:

It is easier for the tooling to install and in general you'll want to use them, but not everything supports Wheel and some people will want to build their own wheels. Think of Wheel as a debian package and the sdist as the source package. Ideally the majority of the time people will be installing from the Wheel but the sdist is still there for those who don't.

OK, that makes sense and what I understood wheels to be.Thanks for the clarification! Daniel's wording made me think suddenly that wheel files were only for distributions that had an extension or something.

I think that's the best way for people to think of sdist/wheel - it's precisely equivalent to srpm/rpm (or the debian equivalent as Donald points out) in the Unix world. And ultimately, the expectation is that people install from wheels even for pure-python projects that could just as easily be installed from source, for precisely the same reasons as people use rpms rather than srpms.

Paul.