are the wheel files that are part of a "packed" pex modified in any way? I've got a bunch of wheels that I had copied from the .deps of a pex and I can't seem to install them directly from pip.

These are installed packages, not distributable wheels, so that won't work.

dang. is there an easy way to gather the wheels that would be normally collected by a pex file? I need to gather the requirements from the requirements.lock file for my app to work.

The lockfile contains URLs to the distributed wheels that the pex is ultimately built from. But this seems like a weird way to go about things. What is the ultimate goal here? Why not, for example, use a venv pex?

can't. we are a flask application that requires mod_wsgi

I actually am looking into a similar "hey I want to unpack a built pex, but still use that env" scenario (namely, deploying code using metaflow).. If I understand your use case, something like this may work? That'll output a "venv" in the specified directory (fwiw, I'm trying to get `pex`s to work natively w/ metaflow, but that's bit more work)