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Bento is the only available packaging tool to heap praise onto and it is impressive. I am reacting to all the hate heaped on setup tools when I think the underlying DistUtils design is a big part of the problem. My feeling is that stdlib packaging tools should be for bootstrapping and reference, more like wsgiref than django.

Wheel is very similar to egg but tries to solve the original setup tools sin of installing something you don't want (the entire setuptools build system) by omitting the runtime component. The result is a very reviewable couple hundred lines bootstrap installer or "unzip" in a pinch. Its also built upon Python standards that were not available when easy\_install was introduced.