"Package management is somewhat of a hell..."
What about it? There's a few packages (mostly C extensions) that don't always build right, but the only problems I've had using pip and virtualenv on Windows have been related to corporate proxies/DNS.
What about it? There's a few packages (mostly C extensions) that don't always build right, but the only problems I've had using pip and virtualenv on Windows have been related to corporate proxies/DNS.
For Python, I have, afaik, 3 (and a half) options:
1) Use something called "easy_install". Installing "easy_install" is not at all easy, which means that the entire experience is somewhat, well, ironic.
1b) Something with "egg files". I never quite understood what these are or how to use them, but I believe they are somehow related.
2) Use something called "pip". If "pip" knows your lib, then all is fine, but if not, things are bad. Also, there are different versions of pip for different "builds" of Python, and I do not know which to use. Tools seem not to be able to figure this out for me. In at least one case I ended up having multiple versions of pip, installed through different means, because the one that came with Python (which afair is the case) was not the right pip version.
3) Google for the library to discover that there is an installer for it, instead of using one of the package manager thingos mentioned above.
Trying to install trac on windows, I had to use all 3 of the above options (not 1b). I forgot what for what, but it wasn't trivial.
As you can see for my story, which is probably full of incorrect details, I'm not an expert. But I'm no expert of ruby gems either, and when I use Ubuntu I'm no expert at apt-get. Why do I need to be an expert of all the four-ish python library distributions to be able to install a single program?
Installing trac is non-trivial no matter what operating system you're using.
virtualenv really is the key to getting this working well.
64 bit vs 32 bit package problems can be horrible, too.