I'm pleased to announce wheel version 0.10.1. In this version of wheel, Paul Moore has done a lot of work on wheel's reference installer, a simple installer that can only install from local wheel files. The wheel installer can now accept pip-style requirements files but it doesn't automatically install dependencies, and it does not uninstall conflicting packages i.e. previous versions of the same package. If you need a mature full-featured installer you should use pip. A notable feature of this version of wheel is that you can use it even when your virtualenv does not contain setuptools or distribute. For example, /tmp/venv/bin/python wheel-0.10.1-py2.py3-none-any.whl/wheel install wheel-0.10.1-py2.py3-none-any.whl executes wheel's wheel to install itself. This feature should be handy for bootstrapping. Wheel's own scripts still use pkg_resources, so you should invoke the tool with "python -m wheel" if you do not want to install distribute or setuptools. On my machine, it takes about 0.7 seconds to install IPython from a wheel.