While a source distribution may be fine for simple software such as our application, packages with complicated build steps such as code compilation may benefit from a built distribution, where the building phase has already been done. The current format used by setuptools for built distributions is the wheel format.
The wheel format replaces an older distutils distribution format called egg. You will still see references to egg when using setuptools or other distutils derivatives.
A wheel (.whl) file is basically a ZIP file containing prebuilt code. They come in the following three types:
- Universal: This wheel file contains only Python code that will run on any platform with any major version of Python (2 or ...
