--- title: Wheels, Bottles and Images | daily.dev description: A deep technical comparison of the three major self-service binary distribution systems: Python wheels, Homebrew bottles, and OCI container images. All three... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/wheels-bottles-and-images-omm1hpmuh twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Wheels, Bottles and Images | daily.dev og:description: A deep technical comparison of the three major self-service binary distribution systems: Python wheels, Homebrew bottles, and OCI container images. All three... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/wheels-bottles-and-images-omm1hpmuh og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/omm1hpMuH.png og:image:alt: Wheels, Bottles and Images og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Wheels, Bottles and Images **[Andrew Nesbitt](https://daily.dev/sources/nesbitt-io)** · 7 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary A deep technical comparison of the three major self-service binary distribution systems: Python wheels, Homebrew bottles, and OCI container images. All three share core design principles — content-addressed immutable blobs, client-side platform selection, separate index and artifact storage, and sigstore-based attestations. Key differences include dependency resolution models, host requirements, and fallback behavior when no matching artifact exists. Homebrew already stores bottles in OCI registries (ghcr.io) using custom annotations for dimensions OCI doesn't natively support. The post also covers convergence trends: ORAS generalizing OCI for arbitrary artifacts, Helm charts moving to OCI registries, and the open problem of GPU/SIMD dimensions not captured by any current tag grammar — addressed by Python's WheelNext/PEP 817 initiative but still unresolved cross-ecosystem. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. 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