i was pleased to see wheel mentioned. here is a wheel anecdote:
suppose you wanted to automate the installation of a python package to a windows machine, but the package has binary dependencies, is irritating to build from source, and is distributed as a pre-built .exe interactive installer (click next, next, ...). you can `wheel convert` the exe installer to get a binary wheel archive, then automate the installation of that wheel archive with pip. hopefully this isn't a common scenario, but the fact that pip + wheel make this kind of thing possible at all is very helpful.
I fail to see the attraction of wheel, and the uptake since it was invented appears to be basically non-existent.
Can someone seriously explain what the point of it is?
As far as I can tell, it's: make life easier for windows python users (which I am one of, and I don't care about it at all; you need VS to build everything anyway; one or two wheel modules makes zero difference; it'll only make a difference when everything uses wheel, which will be never...).
I read the wheel PEP. I got to the part about munging #! shebang lines and stopped reading. Shebang is just totally irrelevant outside of interactive command line convenience. Just run the python you want to run explicitly! Just like java.
suppose you wanted to automate the installation of a python package to a windows machine, but the package has binary dependencies, is irritating to build from source, and is distributed as a pre-built .exe interactive installer (click next, next, ...). you can `wheel convert` the exe installer to get a binary wheel archive, then automate the installation of that wheel archive with pip. hopefully this isn't a common scenario, but the fact that pip + wheel make this kind of thing possible at all is very helpful.