Wheel vs Egg¶

Page Status:	Complete
Last Reviewed:	2014-12-24

• Wheel has an official PEP. Egg did not.
• Wheel is a distribution format, i.e a packaging format. [1] Egg was both a distribution format and a runtime installation format (if left zipped), and was designed to be importable.
• Wheel archives do not include .pyc files. Therefore, when the distribution only contains python files (i.e. no compiled extensions), and is compatible with Python 2 and 3, it’s possible for a wheel to be “universal”, similar to an sdist.
• Wheel uses PEP376-compliant .dist-info directories. Egg used .egg-info.
• Wheel has a richer file naming convention. A single wheel archive can indicate its compatibility with a number of Python language versions and implementations, ABIs, and system architectures.
• Wheel is versioned. Every wheel file contains the version of the wheel specification and the implementation that packaged it.
• Wheel is internally organized by sysconfig path type, therefore making it easier to convert to other formats.

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