title: Python packaging: wheels vs tarball (tar.gz)
body: <p>The advantage of wheels over eggs is clear (see section why not egg? <a href="https://pypi.python.org/pypi/wheel" rel="noreferrer">https://pypi.python.org/pypi/wheel</a>). </p>
  
  <p>However, it is not entirely clear to me what is the advantage of using wheels over <code>tar.gz</code>. I might be missing something obvious like "they are the same". 
  As I see it both can be installed directly using <code>pip</code> (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.</p>
  
  <p>EDIT:
  Just found an example where <code>tar.gz</code> might be better than wheels. CherryPy (<a href="https://pypi.python.org/pypi/CherryPy" rel="noreferrer">https://pypi.python.org/pypi/CherryPy</a>) 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)</p>