[KaiserPro]

Or, you could do what HPC has been doing for years and seperate the config from the machine.

What do I mean by that? shared drives.

Seriously, install python$ver plus dependenceies into /mnt/bin add it into your path. You now have a single source of (readonly optional) each binary version.

this means that you can have many versions of the same software all compiled in a different way. But because they are in the path, they can be transparently managed. Also it means that much of the config management is now in one place, making joining nodes super simple.

[DannoHung]

We do this at my company and it is a fucking nightmare. Why? Because there are like 4 different operating environments and there isn't an official way to do installations and you also have to manage site installations of various packages for each version of each language dependency. And god forbid some environment variable is pointing to the wrong version of something because it's not just as simple as setting PATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH when every thing and its mother tries to set its own fucking environment variables all pointing to wherever they think they were compiled at.

No, it is much much MUCH better to actually have an application build with its dependencies and deploy with its dependencies. And you know how you fix issues with security patches? You have a real build system that rebuilds your binaries and you redeploy regularly.