In prehistoric times, Python developers were faced with a confusing landscape of tools and conflicting advice when they wanted to package their Python modules for public release. As a result of all the distutils/distribute/setuptools changes over the last 5 years, there's lots of confusion about what you should do when preparing a package for distribution - and even some confusion about what the purpose of packaging is in the first place.

After a mammoth effort from a number of volunteers in the community, over several years, this situation is changing. It's taken a while, but the Python community has invented the wheel!

In this talk, we'll look at the process that has led to the development of the wheel format. But more importantly, we'll look at the steps you need to take when packaging a module of Python code for others to use, and get it on the Python Package Index (PyPI).