What is the meaning of “Failed building wheel for X” in pip install?

Question

This is a truly popular question here at SO, but none of the many answers I have looked at, clearly explain what this error really mean, and why it occurs.

One sour

Answer 1

Yesterday, I got the same error: Failed building wheel for hddfancontrol when I ran pip3 install hddfancontrol. The result was Failed to build hddfancontrol. The cause was error: invalid command 'bdist_wheel' and Running setup.py bdist_wheel for hddfancontrol ... error. The error was fixed by running the following:

 pip3 install wheel

(From here.)

Alternatively, the "wheel" can be downloaded directly from here. When downloaded, it can be installed by running the following:

pip3 install "/the/file_path/to/wheel-0.32.3-py2.py3-none-any.whl"