Python on the Wheel
Have you ever come across something so often that you do not understand what they are? And, Python Wheel is one of them.
I ran into this line on the Matplotlib Installation page: Matplotlib releases are available as wheel packages for macOS, Windows and Linux on PyPI. Install it using pip.
Wheel packages? What are they?
Wheel is a built distribution format to replace the Egg (.egg) format (Ah, this reminds me of one common Python package installation error — Fix: ‘Command “python setup.py egg_info” failed with error code 1’…). Let’s get back on the wheels… A wheel (.whl) file is basically a ZIP archive.
Wheel is supported by pip, and according to PEP427, it is more efficient to pip install Python modules from wheels. They are smaller, and faster than Source Distributions (sdist). This page provides a great explanation and comparison between installing a package from the source versus wheels. The improved performance of installing Python packages from wheels is that it skips the step of building from the source.
The wheel is in motion. For Python packaging, ride on the Wheel.
