The advantage of wheels over eggs is clear (see section why not egg? https://pypi.python.org/pypi/wheel). However, it is not entirely clear to me what is the advantage of using wheels over tar.gz. I might be missing something obvious like "they are the same". As I see it both can be installed directly using pip (even in Windows), have similar size and when packaging require a similar effort. It sounds to me like the kind of questions you might get when justifying a packaging methodology. EDIT: Just found an example where tar.gz might be better than wheels. CherryPy (https://pypi.python.org/pypi/CherryPy) provides wheels for Python 3.x only, so if you want to have a local repository to serve CherryPy for Python 2.7 and 3.x dependencies, it seems to make more sense to store the tarball. Is this correct? (just to add a couple of "case-based" justification to the discussion) Continue reading...
