Eggs, VirtualEnv, and Apt - best practices?

[jhermann]

Our solution consists of:
 * our own base python distribution, decoupled from the OS one (for
various reasons, one being version independency)
 * distutils / setuptools / virtualenv is included in that python
installation, no other eggs installed in site-packages
 * virtualenv + Paver to manage build environments
 * Paver plugins containing standard (continuous) build targets
 * a hand-crafted tool that builds an RPM (.deb would be easy, too)
from an egg URL / filename, packaging a ready-to-run virtualenv
environment into the RPM; it's a rather shallow shell above virtualenv
and rpmbuild, automating the process and enforcing company standards.