[okfn-help] Python Apps to help with deployment

[James Casbon]

> Rufus Pollock wrote:
>> Anyone with experience with these or any other relevant apps that
>> they'd like to share please let me know.

They're all a mess really.  You've always had the ability to set the
PYTHONHOME and then install things via python setup.py install - which
is not exactly different from what virtualenv does.  A proliferation
of techniques is not helping - what's really needed is a decent
uninstall route and more help for packagers.

There is buildout which the zope guys use which is declarative, and
therefore you cannot do conditional builds based on, say, platform.
It does, however, do things like build python itself - which is nice
if you want to build the whole stack including python.  I also looked
at waf, but the documentation (and mailing list) didn't help.  Scons
is around as a python based make alternative, but waf is supposedly
lighter and faster.  Paster does something in this space for webapps,
but I never really worked out what.

What exactly are you trying to do?  Replicate a standard set of python
libs across a cluster - you may want to package your stack using the
system standard?  Package an application plus dependencies for a cross
platform install?

You can get quite far on debian with checkinstall ;)