Preparation for updating wheel to 0.46+

[abravalheri]

Summary of changes

#5160 shows an unrelated error started happening when the CI picks up the latest version of wheel. In the CI we can see the following:

DeprecationWarning: The 'wheel.metadata' package has been made
private and should no longer be imported.
Please either copy the code or find an alternative library to
import it from, as this warning will be removed in a future 
version of 'wheel'.

---

My understanding is that this test function is in place to ensure the PKG-INFO/METADATA files generated by the latest setuptools are equivalent to the METADATA file generated by the now deprecated wheel.metadata module.

This test was particularly important during the transition period (when setuptools started to absorb some of the functions in wheel)... but it has been a while now, so we can consider the implementation to be stable. We should be able to remove the problematic test (or at least simplify it a lot) without risking too much.

Closes #5167

Pull Request Checklist

• Changes have tests
• News fragment added in newsfragments/.
  (See documentation for details)

[samhith123]

@abravalheri You might wanna update the https://github.com/pypa/setuptools/blob/main/pyproject.toml to wheel>=0.46.0?

[abravalheri]

Thanks @samhith123, that will be a separated PR. This is just the preparation before doing that.

[Avasam]

#5166 has updated vendored wheel to 0.46.3
If fixing the deprecation warning, let's not forget to also remove its exclusion from pytest.ini

[abravalheri]

After the rebase I can see this very annoying and uninformative CI error:

After downloading and unzipping the logs, I can see:

2026-01-26T18:02:51.9860000Z Evaluating test.if
2026-01-26T18:02:51.9860000Z Evaluating: success()
2026-01-26T18:02:51.9860000Z Result: true
2026-01-26T18:02:51.9890000Z Requested labels: windows-latest
2026-01-26T18:02:51.9890000Z Job defined at: pypa/setuptools/.github/workflows/main.yml@refs/pull/5163/merge
2026-01-26T18:02:51.9890000Z Waiting for a runner to pick up this job...
2026-01-26T18:02:52.2640000Z Job is about to start running on the hosted runner: GitHub Actions 1000276405
2026-01-26T18:02:52.2640000Z Job is waiting for a hosted runner to come online.

Which is still not informative...

[Avasam]

Edit: ah! GitHub status finally updated, there's a current issue: https://www.githubstatus.com/

Normally I see this kind of error when there's no runner available (large runner on an org where they're not available, typo'd runner, usage limit, etc.), but that doesn't make sense here with windows-latest on a public repo ...

One could try enabling debug logging: https://docs.github.com/en/actions/how-tos/monitor-workflows/enable-debug-logging