[p4wnc6]

conda supports pip installation within the context of an environment (much more gracefully, in fact, than does virtualenv). So you're not giving anything up by using conda in this regard.

I don't see the desire to have pip as the baseline. For me, the conda packaging is much more informative and placing everything you need for multiplatform support into an /info directory with a meta.yaml is a lot more effective than going through the steps of PyPI. conda also makes uploading and hosting on anaconda.org extremely easy.

Normally there is the whole "gee, I don't want to learn another package manager" -- but conda / anaconda.org is extremely worth it. It really is a major engineering step forward from the existing package deployment strategies in Python.

I even configure my travis.yml CI scripts to download Miniconda, create a conda environment from a requiremenets.txt, and then build and test my code via conda on the contiguous integration VM itself.

The only worry is how strongly tied conda and anaconda.org are to the future of Continuum. Given how much Continuum speaks of open-source work, one would hope that these projects essentially live independently (or that forks of them would) but you never know. I do admit that is a major downside.