Eggs, VirtualEnv, and Apt - best practices?

[Diez B. Roggisch]

Dmitry S. Makovey schrieb:
> Scott Sharkey wrote:
>> Any insight into the best way to have a consistent, repeatable,
>> controllable development and production environment would be much
>> appreciated.
> 
> you have just described OS package building ;)
> 
> I can't speak for everybody, but supporting multiple platforms (PHP, Perl,
> Python, Java) we found that the only way to stay consistent is to use OS
> native packaging tools (in your case apt and .deb ) and if you're missing
> something - roll your own package. After a while you accumulate plenty of
> templates to chose from when you need yet-another-library not available
> upstream in your preferred package format. Remember that some python tools
> might depend on non-python packages, so the only way to make sure all that
> is consistent across environment - use unified package management.

That this is a desirable goal can't be argued against. Yet two big 
hurdles make it often impractical to be dogmatic about that:

  - different OS. I for one don't know about a package management tool 
for windows. And while our servers use Linux (and I as developer as 
well), all the rest of our people use windows. No use telling them to 
apt-get instal python-imaging.

  - keeping track of recent developments. In the Python webframework 
world for example (which the OP seems to be working with), things move 
fast. Or extremly slow, regarding releases. Take Django - until 2 month 
ago, there hasn't been a stable release for *years*. Virtually everybody 
was working with trunk. And given the rather strict packaging policies 
of debian and consorts, you'd be cut off of recent developments as well 
as of bugfixes.



Diez