wheelreach

Apple published a wheel your Python can't install — and their own source says it should work.

Real case, still live: coreai-models==0.1.0. The wheel on PyPI declares Requires-Python: >=3.14, but the repo's python/pyproject.toml says requires-python = ">=3.11" and .python-version pins 3.11. Anyone on Python 3.11 or 3.12 gets a resolution failure for a package the source claims to support. (Verified against the live PyPI JSON API.)

A second flavor of the same disease: pytorch/pytorch#186099 — triton nightly wheels are built with cp315 tags, but their METADATA still says Requires-Python: >=3.10,<3.15, so pip rejects them on Python 3.15.

wheelreach checks that a package's declared Python support actually has installable release files — the release-integrity question nobody's CI asks.

Part of the release-integrity series: readmeta (did your README render?), wheeltruth (did your wheel ship complete?), casecrash (will your filenames survive checkout?), tagtruth (does the tag match the release?), wheelreach (can your Python actually install it?).

Quickstart

pip install wheelreach
wheelreach check --package coreai-models

version  python  verdict                   wheel
-------  ------  ------------------------  ----------------------------------
0.1.0    3.10    BLOCKED_BY_REQUIRES_PYTHON  coreai_models-0.1.0-py3-none-any.whl
0.1.0    3.11    BLOCKED_BY_REQUIRES_PYTHON  coreai_models-0.1.0-py3-none-any.whl
0.1.0    3.12    BLOCKED_BY_REQUIRES_PYTHON  coreai_models-0.1.0-py3-none-any.whl
0.1.0    3.13    BLOCKED_BY_REQUIRES_PYTHON  coreai_models-0.1.0-py3-none-any.whl
0.1.0    3.14    INSTALLABLE                 coreai_models-0.1.0-py3-none-any.whl

checked 5 version/python pairs, 4 problem(s): 0.1.0 on 3.10 (BLOCKED_BY_REQUIRES_PYTHON), ...
  0.1.0 / 3.11: wheel coreai_models-0.1.0-py3-none-any.whl exists for cp311 but Requires-Python '>=3.14' excludes Python 3.11

Exit codes: 0 clean, 1 problems found, 2 errors (fetch failures, bad args).

Verdicts

The NO_WHEEL / NO_WHEEL_HAS_SDIST split is deliberate: "no wheel" and "nothing installable at all" are different severities, and a checker that conflates them cries wolf on every sdist-only package.

Options:

wheelreach check --package <name> --version 1.2.3   # one version (default: latest stable)
wheelreach check --package <name> --all             # every published version
wheelreach check --package <name> --python 3.11     # single target Python
wheelreach check --package <name> --python-set 3.11,3.12
wheelreach check --package <name> --format json

Config file (pyproject.toml):

[tool.wheelreach]
python_set = "3.11,3.12"
ignore = ["2.0a1"]

What wheelreach does not verify

The target model is CPython on Linux x86-64 — the most common CI/server shape. macOS, Windows, ARM, and alternative interpreters are out of scope for v0.1.0. Wheel-tag compatibility is syntactic (filename tags + metadata), not a trial install: a passing check means pip should accept the file, not that the code runs. Requires-Python clauses beyond ==/!=/>=/<=/>/</~= (with optional .* wildcards) raise an error rather than guessing.