[severb]

This is just plain wrong. There is no reason not to use setup.py for your private "application" as he calls it. Even if it's not distributed trough the public index you may still benefit from having version numbers and "abstract" dependencies for your app. That way you may choose where to look for the dependencies at deploy time and use a private cheeseshop for delivering your private packages, not to mention that requirements.txt is a pip only thing.

[donaldstufft]

Actually you've misread it or I didn't explain it well enough :)

A private library/app can have abstract dependencies. As I said in the post it deals with the "deploy specific" side of a Python application. So each specific deployment would get it's own requirements.txt.

And yes requirements.txt is a pip only thing but the concept applies to the similar file in zc.buildout whose name escapes me at the moment and any other similar file.