How do you use rpm to provide isolation of dependencies and simple control of PYTHONPATH? This lack of awareness shows that you don't understand the purpose of virtualenv. Nobody is arguing about the utility of packages, but you really don't understand the Python world at all if you think that packaging systems cover the use case of virtualenv.
I wasn't talking about virtualenv only. I was referring more to just using setuptools and pip to manage dependencies and upgrades.
However, system packaging is orthogonal to virtualenv. You can have virtualenv setup packaged inside an RPM (an isolated, self contained package).
> How do you use rpm to provide isolation of dependencies and simple control of PYTHONPATH?
Our product has about 50 or so RPMs. Only a couple of packages needed self-containment. Isolation has its downsides -- you cannot reuse code. So we have managed to avoid it as much as possible.
> but you really don't understand the Python world at all
I understand the "deliver a product" world though. Python is part of the product, not the whole product. I think it is little short-sighted to assume everything is just Python and that is the end of the world, and just run "setup.py install" and you are done. And yes, we have been through the "just run pip" or "just run setup.py install as root" before, and it creates a dependency and upgrade tracking nightmare.
Install a plugin using "setup.py install". Then update the package and remove some modules, run "setup.py install" again.
Now all of the sudden your system is messed up because it picks up old, modules that have not been cleaned by properly removing a previous package when upgrading.
