#distutils

Are wheels supposed to be able to contain OS-specific builds of packages so we don't have to constantly rebuild scipy from scratch every time we put our app through the build pipeline?

as I understand it (from reading the mailing list) that's a design goal that isn't fully realized yet, particularly on linux where you have so many different variations

so you can have wheels for win32, win64, osx, and linux, but you can't be sure the linux binaries will work on all the linuxes

Of course, that's a PyPI specific restriction, you're free to make a scipy wheel yourself and host it on your own index

and in fact, with pip 7+, we'll build wheels (assuming you have wheel installed) of everything and cache it locally, so you don't have to repeatidly build.

"assuming you have wheel installed" does this mean the wheel package?

madewokherd: yes

I'm surprised pip uses wheel