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.
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