This post is just my study notes from reading PEP-427 which describes the Wheel distribution format.

The “Jayraj’s understanding” version:

1. A wheel is a zipfile with the extension .whl.
2. When you unzip a .whl file, you get a directory with a -dist-info suffix.
3. The dist-info directory has a file named WHEEL which tells you things. One of these things is if the package is pure Python (purelib) or contains platform-specific (platlib) files.
4. Unless you’re running on 64-bit Red Hat-based platforms, in both cases (purelib & platlib) the directory referenced in dist-info/top-level.txt goes straight into your site-packages. Depending on your PYTHONPATH (I’m assuming) this will either be your system’s site-packages or your virtualenvs
5. There is also a directoy with the suffix .data. This contains further sub-directories that can have names such as data or scripts. As far as I can tell so far, the files in the scripts directory go someplace that’s on your shell’s PATH. No idea where data goes. The spec is vague about the actual destinations of the things inside .data, saying “Move each subtree of distribution-1.0.data/ onto its destination path”. From the context, I gather that the meaning of “its destination path” is generally-known to most people reading the doc.
6. dist-info contains another file called RECORD. When you first unzip the .whl it contains a listing of all the files in the distributions and their SHA-256 hashes for verification. After you’ve moved all the files where they’re supposed to go, the RECORD file is updated with the new paths of each file.