[techdragon]

I can't honestly imagine any circumstances when this would be better than using tools that can manage my Python packages as part of deploying or just using solid Python environment management practices. Why would I want to add the encumbrance of needing to work with system package toolchains to create packages when I want to avoid platform specific mechanisms to minimise my exposure to unexpected issues and retain visibility into failure causes since system package tools can be extremely opaque as to the cause of install failure causes.

For example I use PyEnv instead of virtalenv/venv because PyEnv is written in bash and has a much better level of isolation than virtalenv or venv. It's simple bash scripting and the only system dependencies it has are based on features you choose to use. If you want to build Python from sources you'll need compilers and Libs, etc, but other than that sort of thing, it's zero dependencies.

Edit: PyEnv also has the ability for me to compress an entire Python environment and reuse it somewhere else provided I'm using the same OS and system libraries, so I can pre-build compilation steps and cut down on system package dependencies in production environments.

[snuxoll]

I don't understand how system package managers are considered an "encumberance" by so many developers. It takes all of 10 minutes to write an rpmspec file unless you have a super-hairy build/install process (in which case you should look at fixing that) - I have one in the git repository for all of my python projects along with a Makefile with a sources target that just calls `setup.py sdist` to create a source tarball for rpmbuild.

Pushing out a new release is as simple as running `koji build f23 git+ssh://my.git.server/my/project.git` and within 15 minutes it's been published to my internal yum repository and puppet is installing the newest version on all my servers. How is managing pyenv and dealing with fabric or whatever other tool of choosing any easier than this?

[pm90]

> How is managing pyenv and dealing with fabric or whatever other tool of choosing any easier than this?

Because its all in one language, python. And when stuff errors out in python, you have a traceback and know (mostly) exactly what went wrong.