Pip wheel documentation seems to be outdated

[kasium]

Description

Current docs

 Build Wheel archives for your requirements and dependencies.
  
  Wheel is a built-package format, and offers the advantage of not
  recompiling your software during every install. For more details, see the
  wheel docs: https://wheel.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
  
  Requirements: setuptools>=0.8, and wheel.
  
  'pip wheel' uses the bdist_wheel setuptools extension from the wheel
  package to build individual wheels.

However, if PEP 517 is used, I guess this bdist_wheel is not executed. By setting the build backend to poetry, I was able to run pip wheel . without wheel and setuptools being installed.

Are the docs outdated?

Expected behavior

No response

pip version

22.0.4

Python version

3.7.1

OS

Linux

How to Reproduce

pip wheel -h

Output

No response

Code of Conduct

• I agree to follow the PSF Code of Conduct.

[pfmoore]

It's accurate for the setuptools backend¹, but as you point out other backends have their own way of building wheels.

A PR to update the docs would be welcomed.

Footnotes

1. The fact that you don't need setuptools installed is technically not because of PEP 517, but because pip now does the build in an isolated environment, and installs the backend there. ↩

[pradyunsg]

We should drop that line and link to the build system interface section from there.