My view is that it is not that hard (with any tool) to build a wheel. You can basically follow a guide, you have to supply the same information, it’s mostly jus

My view is that it is not that hard (with any tool) to build a wheel. You can basically follow a guide, you have to supply the same information, it’s mostly just the format you do it in. The problem is that compiled extensions are not a minor use case for Python, they’re hugely widely used for packages even if users don’t use them that much. Building a package with no dependencies is still not that hard. But there is no good way to distribute the compiled packages you depend on as their own thing - Intel release MKL as a “Python” package for e.g. but it is just the C library [1]. But of course, if you’re a package maintainer, the chance that the package maintainer of your dependency has both uploaded it to a package manager in a language they don’t use and that also being the version you need is pretty slim. So the issue becomes “how do I bundle every single possible dependency I might need inside a Wheel”, because source installs are not something most Python users understand. Conda and Spack try and fix this issue by being general package managers that can distribute packages in any language, allowing you to depend on FFTW or Eigen or SUNDIALS or whatever you need in your C extensions, and in all of the discussion I don’t think any proposal really tackles this gap. [1] https://pypi.org/project/mkl/ https://pypi.org/project/mkl/