We do not have a good way to test that wheels are usable. runtests.py is designed to test in-place. It would be nice to have a test_wheel.py script that would build a virtualenv (optionally, not needed on Travis) , install numpy from a wheel, and test that all the scripts like f2py minimally work. Then we could run that script both offline and as part of the release build.

Related to issue #11649