6.4.2 Differences Between Binary And Source Distributions

Installing from a wheel (bdist package) is the recommended, except for Enterprise Linux systems, on which the RPM-based installation method may be preferred.

Wheels can be directly and easily installed without an extra build step. However, a wheel package is often specific to a particular platform and Python version, so there may be cases in which pip cannot find a suitable wheel package based on your platform or your Python version. When that happens, you can get the source distribution (sdist) and produce a wheel package from it for installing Connector/Python.

Note

Creating a wheel package from an sdist may fail for some older Python version, as the Connector/Python source code is only compatible with a specific subset of Python versions.

In summary, the recommendation is to use a bdist unless pip cannot find a suitable wheel package for your setup, or if you need to custom build a wheel package for some special reasons.