Wheels (https://pypi.python.org/pypi/wheel) are the new standard of python distribution and are intended to replace eggs. (see: http://pythonwheels.com/)

Please provide psutil package also as wheel packages (for windows).

To build an individual wheel, run python setup.py bdist_wheel. It is possible to create a wheel package without changing some source code (I dit not try it with psutil but with another project [psycopg2]): After installing wheel this call is possible:

python setup.py --command-packages wheel bdist_wheel

(see: https://docs.python.org/2/distutils/extending.html)

This is something I've been meaning to investigate for a while now but never gotten around it 'cause I'm lazy. =) As for Windows: we already provide different .exe installers for each python version (2.4 -> 3.4, including 64-bit variants): https://pypi.python.org/pypi/psutil#downloads ...for a total of 9 .exe files every time a new version of psutil is released. Does this mean we'll have to provide 9 .wheel files for Windows as well?

I am not quite sure about the number of .wheel files to provide but I guess there will (also) be 9.

The wheel packages will also contain the compiled extensions but IMHO the installation is much easier: I prefer using requirement.txt files (as recommended for pip).

pip 1.5.x defaults to preferring packages in a wheel format so I could install all packages with 'pip install -r requirements.txt'.

On MS Windows this is not possible today - several packages depend on c extensions and want to be compiled at installation. This requires the installation on some kind of Visual Studio (2008 and up). This is possible on a development machine but not in production. And even on development machines sometimes it would be too much effort to fulfill the requirements for compiling this c extensions. Some package (like psutil) already provide precompiled packages - but there is always the extra step of downloading the package manually and executing it or (like I have to do in some projects) add a comment in the requirement.txt and prepare my virtualenv before I can lean back and watch 'pip install -r requirement.txt' do its work.

This will be the main benefit of providing wheel packages (for me): I do not have to worry which packages I manually have to install.

Moreover: You want a green field around psutil on http://pythonwheels.com/! ;-)

psutil has been migrated from Google Code to Github (see: http://grodola.blogspot.com/2014/05/goodbye-google-code-im-moving-to-github.html). Please do NOT reply here but use this instead: https://github.com/giampaolo/psutil/issues/505