This repository holds the example material for the walkthrough What’s the deal with Python wheels? presented at the SeptembRSE conference in September 2021.

The walkthrough is also available as a post on the Oxford RSE group’s blog: https://www.rse.ox.ac.uk/tech_post/python_wheels/.

Abstract

If you’ve ever installed a Python package, you’ve used them before. Python wheels are the recommended format for distribution python code. They allow for a safer, faster easier installation of Python packages. But do you know how wheels are made? Could you tell the difference between wheels and other distribution formats like sdists and eggs? Do you know what “manylinux” means?

This walkthrough takes you on a tour of the Python wheel format. Particularly, we will illustrate how Python wheels come ready to install, effectively bypassing the need to run any setup script or to compile extension module(s). This makes scientific packages that rely on C/C++/Fortran libraries much more accessible, as users do not require to compile the package themselves. This walktrough will demonstrate how to build a self-contained wheel with compiled modules and their library dependencies. If time allows, we’ll have a glance at how you can automate wheel building for several Python versions, on various platforms, using cibuildwheel.

tlestang/septembrse_example

Abstract

Further reading