Where should these go / be defined? The wheel project understands some setup.cfg extensions that are important for Metadata 2.0 and wheel. The [metadata] section allows you to override the setup(install_requires=[...]) with values containing environment markers. [metadata] also lets you specify a LICENSE.txt to be copied into the .dist-info directory (not mentioned in METADATA) just so the resulting wheel is less likely to violate the common "include the license with all copies of this software" restriction. The [wheel] section lets you instruct bdist_wheel to tag your wheel as a universal wheel. [metadata] provides-extra = tool signatures faster-signatures requires-dist = distribute >= 0.6.30 argparse; python_version == '2.6' keyring; extra == 'signatures' dirspec; sys.platform != 'win32' and extra == 'signatures' ed25519ll; extra == 'faster-signatures' license-file = LICENSE.txt [wheel] universal=1 # use py2.py3 tag for pure-python dist