The point of the "wheel host" is to serve as a repository of Python
packages (wheels) built by Jenkins for consumption by `pip` et al. For
applications and libraries that do not provide all of their dependencies
as binary packages, this makes a convenient way to install them without
requiring all of the build tools and dependencies on the destination
machine.
The idea here is that a Jenkins job runs `pip wheel` for a distribution
package name or `requirements.txt` file and then uploads the resulting
wheel files using `rsync`. Apache is configured to serve the upload
directory with an index compatible with `pip`'s `--find-links`.
Dustin C. Hatch
c8d6bae093