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Comment by j-kidd | Hacker News Reader

I think native packages make things too rigid. A private PyPI server hits the sweet spot for us. The steps to deploy an update is as simple as:

1. activate virtualenv

2. run `easy_install -U app`

and no root permission is required. It also has the added benefit to allow having multiple copies of the same package in the same machine [1], which can't be done with native package.

[1] In one deployment, we have staging instance and production instance in the same machine...

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For some environments, this may be the case.

I find native packaging to be really helpful in mixed environments. On a daily basis I need to deploy Rails/PHP/Python, and using a native package manager is a nice common denominator.

When I first heard about this strategy I thought it was crazy -- but have since come to really like it.

Sure you can have multiple version installed with native packages; for examples, see the discussion at https://groups.google.com/group/devops-toolchain/browse_thre...

Of course, it has always been possible to have multiple versions installed with native packages. Gentoo supports that since day 1. What I was talking about though (and I didn't make it clear), is having the same version installed multiple times in different locations (i.e. separate virtualenv).

I think you missed one point here: The package _contains_ the virtualenv, so you even _must_ have multiple copies of the same package for every app that needs it.

That’s the whole point of it: have a consistent and reliable way to deploy whole applications including all dependencies.

That is exactly my point - you have to build multiple packages for the same app, even for the same version (app1_venv_a-1.0, app1_venv_b-1.0), if there is a need to have more than one instances of it running on the same machine.

Until emerge/apt-get/yum/etc add support for virtualenv, I will stick with .egg packages and be python-native rather than system-native.

That’s wrong. The package contains only the application, it’s up to you how you start it. That’s where for configuration (e.g. Puppet or Chef) comes into the game.

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