News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:PEP 427 – The Wheel Binary Package Format 1.0 by lloeki on Saturday February 16, 2013 @02:20PM (#5232624)
First, this does not require code to execute (which setuptools require).

Second, the problem is to know what to copy, or rather what to get. even when it's pure python it can be a problem (e.g py2 vs py3) and it's even more of one with e.g C extensions, where you have a choice of building it from source (thus requiring gcc and all build dependencies such as headers) or getting a pre-built binary tied to a given platform.

Ruby gems support that since quite some time, and it's a bliss to install e.g the libv8 gem in a few seconds vs a lengthy build.

[0]: https://rubygems.org/gems/libv8/versions

Re:PEP 427 – The Wheel Binary Package Format 1.0 by StavrosK on Saturday February 16, 2013 @02:44PM (#5232706)
Oh, so it's more of an improvement rather than "eggs are horribly broken". I think I'm confused with the "easy_install vs pip" thing, where I also don't see much of a difference.

Easy binary retrieval sounds fantastic, though.